The Knight Commander would sneak back to this place in the morning, just to see if the sivak pulled through. If the sivak didn’t live the night, too bad, then Bedell would have to settle for a small trophy from the Dhamon-dragon. Perhaps he’d cut off a small piece of the body—evidence of the kill. A few scales would do, a barbel, or a tooth. The pathetic elf woman would have slunk off by first light, then he could be on his way back to Shrentak. Without his army of goblins, he didn’t care to deal with the elf. She was a tricky one; she had brought the woods to life and held the goblins fast, thus she was a sorceress of considerable power. Confronting her would be above and beyond the call of duty. Sable didn’t know or care about the elf sorceress. Besides, she might figure out how to enchant him or tangle him up in the plants or trees like the stupid goblins, then he couldn’t return to Sable and gain his tremendous reward.
No, he would retreat to a deserted village a few miles away. A couple of the homes were reasonably intact, and he would pass the rest of the night there.
Then he would return in the morning for his precious evidence.
12
Dhamon tucked his long hair behind his ears, then stretched and worked a kink out of his neck. He was in his lair, deep in Sable’s swamp, and he was ogling all the riches he had collected when he was a dragon, thinking how he would carry them all out of the cave to a safer place—build a mansion and live there happily. He would need a wagon and sure-footed mules that could navigate the marsh. Several wagons, he corrected himself, as he looked into an alcove, the floor of which was covered with gold coins. Coins such as those had not been used on Krynn in a long time, and collectors would pay highly for them, especially in this marvelously preserved condition. He tried to remember where he’d gotten them—ah, yes…a few months ago he’d lumbered across an old ruin and Ragh had delved into a tunnel. The draconian came back with the gold coins and a handful of egg-shaped pieces of marble strung together on a thin cord.
He had gems more precious than all those gold coins. Four matching sapphires that he claimed off the body of a Knight Commander were faultless and were the prize of his collection. Those walnut-sized gems couldn’t have honestly belonged to the knight; Dhamon suspected they had come from Sable and were to be used as a gift or a bribe. Those four gems alone would be enough to buy him a fine house and furnishings in whatever city he eventually decided to settle in. Perhaps he would build several mansions in different cities, opting to travel between homes whenever he felt like a change of scenery. Some of the baubles he would save for Feril, of course. Even a Kagonesti appreciated jewelry. He fancied her wearing a thin strand of pearls he’d taken off the corpse of a female knight.
“It wasn’t proper in my day,” Dhamon mused, thinking of that knight who had died easily by his caustic breath. When Dhamon was a Dark Knight no jewelry could be worn, and certainly no jewelry was taken off dead bodies—save the odd memento. The knighthood had changed, for the worse as far as he was concerned. There wasn’t as much honor, and loyalties were divided. “Shouldn’t he proper now.” He bent and ran his fingertips over a bowl filled with polished onyx chips, then turned and went to inspect other riches at the far end of his cave.
There was one of his favorites—a long sword displayed on a stack of shields. The sword had been taken from the same Knight Commander who had carried the four sapphires. The sword was as strong and fine in its craftsmanship as any Dhamon had ever seen, and he ached to be human again, to properly hold it and feel its balance. Dhamon knelt and almost reverently touched the pommel. It was made of a hard metal that gleamed like silver but was far more precious. It felt comfortingly warm to the touch. The grip was etched with runes and studded with blue topaz cabochons. When he studied it closely, he could tell that the runes and gems had been set to represent constellations. The crosspiece was inlaid with gold and crushed pearls, and it curved at the ends, looking like the horns of a bull. His fingers wrapped around the pommel and he picked it up, briefly feeling the regret that a good sword never felt the same gripped in dragon’s claws.
“Beautiful,” he said in a hushed voice. The blade was made of the same metal as the pommel, hammered to a fault, extraordinarily sharp. The balance was perfect, all of it feeling impossibly light and so easy to wield. “To battle with this! Wonderful!”
Dhamon decided he would hang this favorite sword above the mantel in his favorite house, wear it into town on certain days, wield it against any who caught his eye with a challenging glance. He vowed this particular sword was one prize he would never sell. There were plenty of other pieces of treasure that he also didn’t intend to part with: some fine pieces of armor and an impressive shield edged in platinum and bearing the visage of Reorx the Forge. There was that nightbird statue that Ragh thought was magical and a pair of exquisite throwing daggers.
It was going to be hard to decide what to sell and what to keep.
“Ragh,” Dhamon mused. He would keep the daggers for the sivak, and probably give him a few sacks of steel pieces too. Nothing too. valuable or too extravagant, he thought, but the sivak deserved something for all his help building this hoard.
Dhamon made a slashing gesture with the sword and watched the blade gleam and flash in the light…the light of what? Where was that light coming from?
He spun, looking for the source and seeing moisture glint off the walls of his lair. What was that unaccustomed smell? He should be smelling the swamp, rotting plants and stagnant water, overripe blooms and dank earth, but he didn’t smell anything, not even his own glorious sweat. Neither could he hear anything, all of a sudden. He listened hard for the usual sound of leaves shushing outside, the omnipresent trickling of water—everywhere there was water in the swamp. He couldn’t even hear the clicking of his boot heels against the stones of the cave. He froze, holding his breath, concentrating. Then, faintly, he could hear a gentle thrumming, regular at the beginning, then growing softer and erratic.
“Oh, it’s my heart,” Dhamon realized. He felt his heartbeat slow down, the thrumming difficult even to detect now. “I must be dreaming. I’m dying.”
Feril’s nervous fingers fluttered over the scales on Dhamon’s legs. Dead? He couldn’t be dead, she told herself. Impossible. A dragon as ferocious, as beautiful as this one, could not have been felled by mere goblins—not even by a limitless army of them, yet no question about it, Dhamon wasn’t breathing.
Nothing was breathing within her line of sight. There must have been nearly two hundred dead goblins spread across the clearing and into the woods, all smashed, broken, skewered, or otherwise killed by Dhamon, yet Dhamon was dead.
“How could he be dead?” Feril fought back tears. The scent of the dead dragon was intense, and coupled with the stench from the dead goblins and all the blood, it was overwhelming. “To lose Dhamon again. This can’t happen.”
Perhaps it was the Lake of Death, she thought. Maybe even though Dhamon had been part of her shadow when she was in the lake, the cold and the touch of the undead had so weakened him that the goblins were able to conquer him in the end.
“You can’t be dead.” Her lips brushed the top of his claw. “How could…”
Several small goblin spears were wedged between scales on Dhamon’s claw, and in the light of the moon she saw that something other than blood glistened from those wounds. Feril felt the substance with her fingers. It was dark and oily, smelling like decaying plants.