Chaosbound (11 page)

The Great Wyrm provides for all your wants: meat to cure the pangs of hunger, ale to ease a troubled mind, the wine of violence in the arena to entertain. All of these are found in the city. There is no need to ever leave
.

—From the Wyrmling Catechism

Crull-maldor peered down from a spy hole in the wyrmling's citadel at the Fortress of the Northern Wastes. A band of human warriors two hundred strong had encircled her watchtower, and now they stood below, blowing battle horns, bellowing war cries, and shaking their fists at the tower as they encouraged themselves for battle.

These were small men by wyrmling standards. They were not the well-bred warriors of Caer Luciare that she'd known in her world. These small folk wore armor made of seal skins, gray with white speckles, and had bright hair that was braided and slung over their backs. They bore axes and spears for battle, and carried crude wooden shields. They had dyed their faces with pig's blood, hoping to look frightening.

Crull-maldor fought back the urge to laugh. No doubt they thought they looked fierce. Perhaps they even were fierce. But they were small, like the feral humans that had gone to war with the wyrmlings three thousand years ago.

She admired their fortitude. No doubt they had seen the giant footprints of the wrymlings and had some inkling as to what they were up against.

But none of the wyrmlings had shown themselves. Sundown was long hours away. It was late afternoon, and the dust particles in the air dyed
the world in shades of blood. The sun cut like a rapier, leaving stark shadows upon the world.

The enormous stone pinnacle of the fortress's watchtower, standing three hundred feet tall and crafted from slabs of rock forty feet thick, drew the small humans like flies to a carcass.

They had been coming all morning—first children eager to explore this strange new landmark, then worried parents and siblings who were wondering what had befallen the children. Now an angry mob of warriors prepared for battle.

Human settlements surrounded the towers. No doubt by nightfall the small folk would begin to muster a huge army.

Still, the warriors below did not want to wait for reinforcements. So they sang their war songs, gave their cheers, lit their torches, and rushed into the entrance.

At Crull-maldor's back, the wyrmling Lord Aggrez asked, “What is your will, milady?”

Wyrmling tactics in this instance had been established thousands of years ago. The tunnels at the mouth of the cave wound down and down. No doubt the humans imagined that it led straight up to the citadel, but they would have to travel miles into the wyrmling labyrinth to find the passage that led up.

Along the way, they would have to pass numerous spy holes and kill holes, ranging through darkness that was nearly complete, down long rocky tunnels lit only by glow worms.

“Let them get a mile into the labyrinth,” Crull-maldor said, “until they find the bones and offal from their children. While they are stricken with fear and rage, drop the portcullises behind them, so that none may ever return. I myself will lead the attack.”

Crull-maldor peered at the lord. Aggrez was a huge wyrmling—nine feet in height and more than four feet across the shoulder. His skin was as white as chalk, and his pupils were like pits gouged into ice. He frowned, his lips hiding his overlarge canines, and Crull-maldor felt surprised to see disappointment on his face. “What troubles you?”

“It has been long since my troops have engaged the humans. They were hoping for better sport.”

Twenty thousand warriors Crull-maldor had under her command, and it had been too long since they had fought real battles, and too long since they had eaten anything but walrus and seal meat.

“You want them for the arena?” Crull-maldor asked.

“A few.”

“Very well,” Crull-maldor said. “Let us test their best and bravest.”

Though Crull-maldor did not lead the way, she followed. This would be her people's first real battle against a new enemy, and though the humans were small, she knew that even something as small as a wolverine could be astonishingly vicious.

So she went down into the tunnels, to the ambush site. The metal tang of blood was strong in the air, and filled the hallway. Dozens of the small folk had already been carried down to this point, deep under the fortress. Their offal lay on the floor—piles of gut and stomachs, kidneys and lungs, hair and skulls.

The humans had been harvested, their glands taken for elixirs, the meat for food, the skins as trophies. Not much was left.

Now Crull-maldor chose a small contingent of warriors to lead the attack, and they waited just down the corridor from the ambush site, silent as stone.

It took the human warriors nearly half an hour to arrive. They bore bright torches. Their leader—a fierce-looking man with golden rings in his hair and a helm that sported the horn of a wild ox poking forward—found the bones of his children.

Some of the men behind him cursed or cried out in anguish, but their leader just squatted over the pile of human refuse, his face looking grim and determined. His face was dyed in blood, and his hair was red, and torchlight danced in his eyes.

Quietly, each wrymling raised a small iron spike and plunged it into his neck. The spikes, coated with glandular extracts harvested from the dead, filled the wyrmlings with bloodlust, so that their hearts pounded and their strength increased threefold.

The wyrmlings roared like beasts, and the rattling of chains in the distance gave answer. The portcullises slammed into the floor behind the humans, metal against stone, with a boom like a drum that shook the world.

Half a dozen wyrmling warriors led the attack, charging into the human hosts, bearing long meat hooks to pull the men close and short blades to eviscerate them. They hurtled heedlessly into battle.

The human leader did not look dismayed. He merely hurled his torch forward a dozen paces to get better light; in a single fluid move he reached back and pulled off his shield.

The wyrmlings roared like wild beasts; one shouted “Fresh meat!” as he attacked.

Instantly the human warlord snarled, and suddenly he blurred into motion. Crull-maldor had never seen anything like it. One instant the human was standing, and the next his whole body blurred, faster than a fly's wings, and he danced into the wyrmling troops, his fierce war ax flashing faster than the eye could see.

Lord Aggrez went down, lopped off at the knee, as the warrior blurred past, slashing throats and taking off arms. In the space of a heartbeat he passed the wyrmling troops and raced toward Crull-maldor.

The human warriors at Caer Luciare had always been smaller than wyrmlings, yet what they lacked in size they made up for in speed. But this small warrior was stunning; this went far beyond anything in Crull-maldor's experience.

The women and children had not shown such speed. There was only one explanation—magic, spells of a kind that Crull-maldor had never imagined.

The warrior raced toward her, but seemed not to see her. Her body was no more substantial than a fog, and she wore clothing only for the convenience of her fleshly cohorts—a hooded red cloak made of wispy material with the weight and consistency of a cobweb.

Thus her foe did not see her at first, but was peering up at the great wyrmlings behind her. In the shadows of the tunnel, she was all but invisible.

The humans' champion bellowed—fear widening his eyes while his
mouth opened in a primal scream. He charged toward the wyrmlings behind her, and suddenly his breath fogged, and terror filled his eyes.

He felt the cold that surrounded Crull-maldor. It stole his breath and made the blood freeze in his veins.

He shouted one single word of warning to the warriors behind, and then Crull-maldor touched him on the forehead with a single finger.

Her touch froze the warrior in his tracks, robbed him of thought. He dropped like a piece of meat, though she had brushed him only lightly.

The rest of the human warriors backed away in fear, nearly in a rout. Crull-maldor knelt over her fallen foe for a moment, sniffed at his weapons. There was no enchantment upon them, no fell curses.

She rose up and went into battle, floating toward the rest of the warriors. None raced with their leader's speed. None bellowed war cries or tried to challenge her.

They were defenseless against her kind.

Crull-maldor was the most powerful lich lord in her world; she feared nothing.

She did not wade into battle on legs, but instead moved by will alone.

Thus she drove into ranks of the small humans. They screamed and sought to escape. One man tried to drive her back with a torch, and the webbing of her garment caught fire. Thus, for a few brief moments she was wreathed in smoke and flame, and all of the humans saw the hunger in her dead face and the horror of her eyes, and they wailed in despair.

Then, invisible without her cloak, Crull-maldor waded into the human troops and began to feed, drawing away the life force of those who tried to flee, or merely stunning those whose ferocity in battle proved that they would make good sport in the arena.

There were no more warriors like the mage that had confronted her. She found herself hoping for stronger resistance. She found herself longing for a war that promised great battles and glorious deeds, for only by distinguishing herself could she hope to gain the attention of Lady Despair, and thus perhaps win the throne.

But she was bitterly disappointed.

As the last human warrior crumpled to his knees and let out a mewling
cry, like a child troubled by nightmares, Crull-maldor told herself: There are millions of humans in the barrens now. Perhaps among them I will find a worthy foe.

Her wyrmling troops feasted upon fresh man-flesh that evening, and then prepared a few captured humans for the arena, stripping them naked lest they have any concealed weapons.

That was when Crull-maldor found the markings upon the humans' champion. His skin bore scars from a branding iron, and upon the warrior's flesh she saw ancient glyphs, primal shapes that had formed the world from the beginning.

Crull-maldor studied a glyph—actually four glyphs all bound into a circle. The largest was the rune for might, but attached to it were other smaller glyphs—seize, confer, and bind.

The lich lord had never seen such scars before, but instinctively she knew what they meant. It was a spell of some nature, a type of parasitical magic, which caused attributes from one being to be imbued upon another.

This is a new form of magic, she realized, one with untold potential. She suspected that she could duplicate the spells, even improve upon them, if she knew more. With mounting excitement she pored over the champion's other scars: speed, dance, resilience. Four types of runes were represented, and Crull-maldor immediately knew that she could devise others that the humans had not anticipated.

Suddenly, the humans and their new magic took on great import in her mind.

She did not know if she should reveal what she had found to the emperor. Perhaps he already knew about this strange magic. Perhaps he would never know—until after Crull-maldor had mastered it.

So far today, she had not heard from the emperor. Certainly he had witnessed the great change wrought upon the world. Other wyrmling fortresses would be reporting the sightings of humans.

But if things were amiss in the capitol at Rugassa, Crull-maldor had not been forewarned.

Probably, she thought, the emperor will not tell me anything. He hopes that I will fail, that I will embarrass myself, so that he will look better in return.

It had always been this way. Their rivalry had lasted for more than four hundred years.

But at the moment, Crull-maldor suspected that she had the upper hand.

I could just tell him that humans have come, she thought, and not warn him of the dangers of confronting them.

She liked that. A half-truth oft served better than a lie.

But she decided to wait. She didn't need to report the incursion instantly.

Little of import happened that day. One of he wyrmling captains reported a strangeness: some of her subjects claimed to recall life on another world, the world that had fallen from above. They wished to leave the fortress, head south to their own homes.

Crull-maldor ordered that all such people be put to death. There was no escaping the wrymling horde.

So she waited until after sundown, when the long shadows stretched into full darkness and bats began to weave about the citadel in their acrobatic hunt.

Stars glowered overhead, the fiery eyes of heaven, and a cool and salty breeze breathed over the land.

With the coming of night, the spirits of the land rose from their hiding places.

A second human army was gathering for the night, soldiers from far places riding horses to the towers. Crull-maldor did not want to leave her wyrmlings defenseless, yet she needed to gain information.

So while the armies began to surround her fortress, Crull-maldor dropped from the citadel and went floating beneath the starlight, weaving her way between boulders, drifting above the gorse and bracken.