A Dragon's Ascension - Ed Greenwood [21]
If the bat saw what was behind it, it gave no sign-but then, bats seldom do.
The lonely figure in the dark, warm cavern stiffened above the drift spell, and then bent to peer closely at it. "Strong," he said, in a surprised voice. "'Very strong-but slumberous. Not a Dwaer, but what?"
Then he shrugged, and told the empty darkness, "No matter. Whatever it may be, I shall have it! With warlords whelming iron-heads to march on the throne and Snake-lovers everywhere, no magic is too much."
The darkness answered not, but that had long since ceased to bother the lonely wizard. He talked to the darkness a lot.
Right now, he was smiling rather unpleasantly. Moving a safe distance away from the glowing fog of the drift spell, he cast another magic. "Go forth, my Melted. Go and snatch this thing of magic for me."
Then he sighed, and added, "Even if your fellows haven't yet managed to slay four bumbling overdukes for me. Corloun, your creations leave something to be desired."
Corloun, of course, was far too dead to answer.
"Desired," the wizard murmured to the darkness-and, as always, thought of Embra Silvertree. Bare and beautiful, as she'd been so often when he'd spied on her, that first summer while binding her to the castle. Furious… and helpless…
He sighed again, and told the darkness, "Embra, you'd have made a lovely slave."
Then he smiled again. "And you still might."
If one believed the faded signboard out front, the Glory of Aglirta was some sort of gold two-headed dragon with an impossibly long, looped, and knotted tail. But then again, perhaps too many tankards of dark ale do the same dark work on the vision of artists as to more common folk, and the real dragon had but one head and a more modest tail. Or then again, perhaps the artist had been blessed by the gods with the opportunity to see a nightwyrm and live to remember the experience… and had merely gotten the color wrong.
Dragons, nightwyrms, and glory of any sort were all sights so rare as to be legendary in this upland corner of the Vale, hard by the foothills that became the Windfangs, north and west of Tselgara.
Off-color converse was the norm in the dim, dirty interior of the Glory, where rats scuttled among the rushes, the dirt floor was none too even, and weary men in worn smocks and many-patch cloaks nursed more drink than stew. Grumblings about gold-drenched merchants in distant, thieving Sirlptar and the fool heads of Flowfoam were even more common than mutterings about the wolves, the weather, outlaws, and strange beasts of the mountains. Folk everywhere snarl about their kings and the doings of kings, from taxes to heavy-handed soldiery to threatened war.
Yet there was a grimness in the Glory this afternoon, a darkness of heart and hope that had lurked at the bottoms of its large tankards for nigh a season, growing steadily stronger and heavier.
"Chaos grips Aglirta like a strangler's hand on throats, he said," Old Adbert said, propping the stump of his left leg on the bench beside him with a grunt of pain. "I heard him-and him a bard, too, up and down the Vale like sea wind, seeing all and hearing Three near all, too!"
"Chaos has been choking Aglirta since I was born, and before," Thaeker Blackcloak responded, spitting onto a passing rat. "Aglirta takes a long time dying, y'must admit."
"Admit nothing," one of the Luroan brothers called, from his corner table. "Always safer that way!"
"Ye've found it so, hey, Guruld?" Thaeker flung back, swirling his tankard. "Look at it as entertainment, sent to us by the gods! This baron defies the regent here,