Silver Shadows - Elaine Cunningham [69]
So he watched as the scout took a torch from his pack and struck flint to steel. A few sparks scattered into the night like startled fireflies, and then the flame rose high. Vhenlar blinked at the sudden bright flare of light. His eyes focused, and then widened. There were not two, but three figures standing in the circle of torchlight!
A wild elf, a young male with black braids and fierce black eyes, hauled back a waterskin and prepared to douse the flame. Or so Vhenlar assumed. He watched, as transfixed as the two dumbfounded scouts, as the elf hurled the contents of the skin. Not at the torch-wielding Justin, but at Tocher.
And then he was gone, before any of the mercenaries could unsheathe a blade or nock an arrow.
Justin sniffed, and his face screwed up into an expression of extreme disgust as he regarded the other scout. "You smell like something my mother drinks outta painted teacups!" he scoffed.
The analogy was apt. Tacher had been doused with a strong infusion of mint. Vhenlar, who could see no reason for this action, turned to one of their rangers-a tall, skinny fellow from the Dalelands. Once a noble ranger-whatever the Nine Hells that meant-he'd fought the Tuigan horde and seen his illusions about humankind burn to ash in the inferno that was war. Since then, he'd taken to looking out for himself and had developed a real talent for it.
"You know more about the forest than most of us," Vhenlar said. "Why'd the elf do that? He coulda killed Tacher and Justin both, easy."
The ranger shook his head impatiently and held up a hand, indicating a need for silence. The others fell quiet and listened, but their ears were not as sharp as those of the Dalesman. To Vhenlar's ears, there was only the constant hum and chirp of insects, the occasional shriek of a hunting raptor, and the whispering of the night winds through the thick forest canopy. A whispering, Vhenlar noted, that seemed to be growing louder.
Suddenly the ranger's eyes went wide. "Wintermint!" he muttered and then took off at a frantic run.
The others watched, bemused, as the ranger crashed off heedlessly toward the south. Before they could follow suit, a roar rolled through the forest-a fearsome sound that was both shriek and rumble, a cry of rage such as few of them had ever heard before. Yet there was not a man among them who did not know instinctively what it meant: Dragon.
Vhenlar had heard men speak of dragonfear, the paralyzing terror that comes from looking into the eyes of a great wyrm. He now knew that the very sound of a dragon's cry could root a man's boots to the soil and turn his legs to stone.
The dragonfear lasted but a moment, but that was long enough. With the speed of a wizard's transformation, the dragon's passage through the forest changed from a rustling murmur into a deafening crash. Like a tidal wave, the dragon came on. Vhenlar would never had guessed that something so large could move with such speed!
Then he caught a glimpse of it through the trees, still a couple hundred feet away but closing fast. It was a white, and it glittered like some enormous, reptilian ghost against the darkness of the forest. The creature stopped, fell back on its haunches, and inhaled deeply.
The trees parted, the leaves cringing away and falling in brittle shards as an icy winter wind tore through the forest. Widening as it came, a cone of devastation blasted everything in its path and reached icy, grasping hands toward the mercenaries.
With the clarity of absolute terror, with a heart-stopping fear that made everything around him seem to slow down to a speed of a drifting snowflake, Vhenlar watched it come.
The dragon's breath reached the scouts, so quickly that it froze Justin's face in its derisive sneer, so suddenly that it caught Tacher in the act of turning toward the onrushing sound. It leached all color from their skin, coating their hair and clothes in a thick layer of frost. To all