“Hold!” Cormack yelled at the dwarf, and he rushed back. “He can tell us.”
The warriors of the tribes increased the number and ferocity of their attacks on the dragon. As one, they dismissed their fear and threw their spears, or rushed to engage the beast whenever it swooped low enough for them to reach. They hardly cared for the trolls, then, for next to this monster, those creatures seemed no more than a nuisance.
But the dragon seemed unbothered by it all, seemed pleased by it all. Toniquay and the other shamans, chanting more fiercely to inspire and protect and strengthen their charges, throwing whatever offensive magics they could conjure at the beast, understood better than their noble and ferocious warriors.
And in that understanding, they trembled with fear.
For the dragon not only seemed impervious, but seemed to grow, in size and in strength. No spear penetrated its scaled armor, and no warrior stood against it for more than a few heartbeats. Tearing claws and snapping maw, thunderously beating wings and snapping, clubbing tail drew a line across the Alpinadoran ranks, laying men and women low with impunity.
“How do we even hurt it?” Toniquay heard himself asking. Hoping to answer just that, the shaman completed his spell, bringing forth a bird sculpture he had just magically fashioned from the ice. He held it up before his lips and blew life into the small, crystalline golem, then thrust out his arm, launching it away at the dragon.
The gleaming ice bird flashed overhead, gaining tremendous speed before crashing hard into the dragon.
If the great beast even noticed the animated missile, it did not show it, and the ice bird exploded into a million tiny and harmless droplets of water.
Toniquay winced, and then did so again as he saw another man lifted into the air in the dragon’s rear talons. Those mighty feet squeezed powerfully and with such force that the poor warrior’s eyeballs popped from their sockets, blood and tissue flushing out behind.
Toniquay could only suck in his breath in horror.
They hustled up the ice ramp, Brother Jond leaning heavily on Bransen and the four dwarves bringing up the back of the line, carrying the captured and battered Samhaist by the wrists and ankles.
The ascending corridor wrapped around to the right as it rose, crossing over one landing and then another, both circular and both centered by the same wide icy beam that seemed the main support for this part of the castle structure.
“I’m not thinking he’s long for living,” Mcwigik said, and the people in front paused and considered the poor fellow, and winced as one as the dwarves just let him drop face down on the floor.
“Don’t ye even be thinking of it,” Mcwigik warned them, and Bransen laughed at the accuracy of the dwarf’s guess, for he too could clearly see the silent debate between the two over whether or not they would use their healing magic to help the man.
“We cannot just let a fellow human die,” Milkeila remarked, as much to her fellow humans as to the dwarves.
Ruggirs walked up beside Mcwigik, stared hard at the humans, then stomped on the back of the Samhaist’s neck. Neck bones shattered with a sickening crunch and the Samhaist twitched violently once or twice before lying very still.
“Yer magic’s for meself and me boys, and don’t ye even think o’ using it on one of them that we’re fighting when there’s fighting afore us,” Ruggirs explained.
“Yach, but it’s not looking like he was hurt that bad after all,” Pergwick said from behind the angry Ruggirs, and Bransen understood the statement to be for the sake of the humans and nothing more, a way to accentuate Ruggirs’s point.
“But ye was right, Mcwigik,” Pergwick went on. “He weren’t long for living.”
Mcwigik waved his hand at the humans, bidding them to move along.
They wore expressions of shock (even outrage, in the case of Milkeila and Brother Jond), but they did indeed move along, for they hadn’t the time to discuss the powries’ tactics.
At the top of the ramp, they came into another circular room, and recognized that they were in the highest tower of the many-turreted castle. Here, too, the support beam ended, but at floor level and not at the ceiling, for it was no support beam in the conventional sense at all.
It was the base of a fountain, one that sprayed a fine and warm mist into this room. That mist contained power, Bransen recognized immediately, and so did Milkeila. That mist was the stuff of Samhaist and shaman earth magic, the exact conduit Milkeila had sought.
The water stream lifted about six feet into the air, before collapsing back in on itself and splashing down into a two-tiered bowl, and though that base was also made of ice, it seemed impervious to the warm flow.
“This is his source of power,” Milkeila stated, moving closer and lifting her hand to feel the splash and spray. “This is where Ancient Badden connects to his earthly power.”
“You can feel it?” Cormack asked, and Milkeila’s expression showed clearly that she was surprised that he could not.
“I can, as well,” Bransen said. “It is not so unlike the emanations of your gemstones. It teems with energy, with ki-chi-kree.“
Cormack rubbed his face and looked over at Brother Jond, who sat silent and expressionless. What Bransen had just said, the comparison of Samhaist magic to Abellican, would be considered heretical to the leaders of the Abellican Church, but Jond seemed not to mind, nor to disagree.
And Cormack certainly didn’t. Adding the fact that Bransen had also included his own mystical powers, this strange concept of chi, only reinforced to Cormack that he was right in this, that all the Churches and magical powers were in fact pieces of the same god and same godly magic.
As he considered that, he felt an acute sting, a memory of his whipping, across his torn back.
Bransen closed his eyes and stepped up to the fountain, then washed his bare arm through it.
“If that is Badden’s source of power, can we, too, use it?” Cormack asked. “Perhaps to counter the Ancient?”
“We cannot use it as he uses it,” Milkeila replied. “The powers he garners from it are… beyond me.”
“This magic is not focused and stable, as with the Abellican gemstones,” said Bransen. “It is fluid and ever-changing, and we cannot access it as Badden does-certainly not in the time we have.”
“What, then?” Cormack asked.
“Despoil it,” both Jond and Milkeila suggested together.
“I will weave spells into it, to divert it from whatever course Badden has fashioned,” the barbarian shaman explained, and she stepped right up and began softly chanting, singing, an ancient rhythm of an ancient blessing.
Similarly, Bransen held his arm in the flow and sent his chi into it, trying to stagger the infusions and twist them in a wild attempt to somehow alter the magic within the water.
And most straightforward of all came the powries, all four. “Ye heard her, boys,” said Mcwigik. “Put a bit o’ the dwarf into it!” They lined up around the bowl, unbuckled their heavy belts and dropped their britches, and began their own special and to-the-point method of despoiling the magical water.
“Hope he’s not drinking it,” Bikelbrin noted with a snicker.
“Yach, but I hope he is,” Pergwick added. “We’ll give him a taste o’ the powries he’s not to forget, what!”
He soared over their line with impunity, roaring and breathing forth lines of fire, ignoring their feeble spears thrown by their weak, mortal muscles. He was Badden, Ancient of the Samhaists, the voice of the ancient gods, who blessed him with the power of immortals, in this case, the strength of a true dragon.
He pondered that if he killed enough of them up here, he might not even need to drop the front off of the glacier and flood the lake. It was a fleeting thought, though, for after the contamination these heathens had brought, the lake would be better off for the purification, in any event! Besides, he would enjoy it. As he enjoyed this slaughter of unbelievers. He raked the line; he roared with divine joy.