Dragonlance

  Dhamon Volume 2

  Betrayal

  Jean Rabe

  Chapter One

  Nura’s Choice

  Inside the cave the darkness was an impenetrable blanket that cloaked the creature sleeping within.

  Only its breath gave it away—this raspy and uneven, echoing hauntingly against the stone walls and escaping as a breeze to tease the coppery curls of the child who stood just beyond the entrance.

  She was no more than five or six, cherubic and clothed in a diaphanous dress that at first glance appeared to be fashioned of pale flower petals, but on closer inspection seemed instead to shimmer as if it were made of magic. The fingers of her left hand were clenched about the haft of a glaive, an axe-bladed pole-arm more than twice her height that looked far too unwieldy for her to manage.

  The fingers of her right hand playfully stroked the giant fern leaves that helped to conceal the cave mouth.

  The green of the ferns was intense, brightened by a fiery late afternoon sun and made slick with humidity. Droplets of water beaded and gleamed like diamonds.

  “Mumummmm-ummm,” she sang when she spotted a furry caterpillar, striped orange and golden-brown, standing out starkly against a diamond-dotted frond. She stared at it for several long moments, then gently picked it up and held it before her wide, blue eyes. “Soft,” she pronounced.

  “Very pretty.” The thing slowly wriggled, and in response she laughed in a voice that was not at all childlike. She popped the caterpillar into her mouth and swallowed it, just as she stepped inside the cave and was swallowed by the darkness.

  “Master?” she whispered, as she instinctively padded forward, her bare feet slapping against the stone. It was an enormous cave, whose depths she couldn’t guess, no matter if dozens of torches had been merrily burning. It was one of several the creature had in this part of Krynn, all connected through underground tunnels that the child was occasionally permitted to wander. This particular cave was the most familiar to her.

  Though well shielded from the sun, the interior was stifling, the air damp and close and filled with the strong, sweet-sour stench of decay. The child inhaled deeply, holding and relishing the scent, then almost reluctantly releasing it.

  “Master?”

  A pause, then again she repeated the word, no longer a question now, as she effortlessly tossed the glaive to the floor, its blade clanging against the stone. In response, twin globes of dull yellow appeared in the middle of the blackness. They were eyes, larger than wagon wheels and cut through by murky catlike slits. Though there was a thick film on them, they gave off a faint light, eerie and just enough to illuminate the creature’s massive snout and the child who was dwarfed by it. The girl stood on her toes and reverently stretched a hand up to graze the edge of the creature’s jaw.

  “You summoned me, O Very Old One?” Her voice was husky now and had an edge to it, a sultry woman’s voice.

  The creature’s raspy breath was broken by a rumbling of words so sonorous and loud they caused a tremor to ripple through the ground. “Nura Bint-Drax,” it said, each syllable excruciatingly drawn out and returning as an echo. “Nura. My very young servant.”

  “Your chosen one.” The child smiled and shifted back and forth on the balls of her feet, spread her arms wide. She turned her head this way and that so the hot breeze of the creature’s fetid breath could wash over her. “Your very loyal servant.”

  There were no more words for a time. The creature silently regarded the child, and the child basked in the creature’s presence. Then the great eyes blinked, and the child haltingly stepped back, thin arms falling to her sides, shoulders squaring, unblemished face fixed forward, standing like a soldier at attention.

  The rumbling started again. The words came so ponderously slow that the child had to concentrate to understand.

  “Yes, Master. I have made a selection, a most suitable one. You will be quite pleased.” She felt the next question as much as heard it, the tremors shivering through the stone floor and tickling the bottoms of her feet.

  “His name is Dhamon Grimwulf, Master. A human.”

  There was another silence, this one seemingly interminable, as Nura’s legs and arms tingled from remaining straight and motionless for so long. She breathed shallowly and somehow managed not to blink. Finally, the creature’s breath quickened and it raised its head, tucking its jaw into its neck and tilting it so as to look sharply down upon the child, eyes narrowing disapprovingly.

  “A human,” the creature stated, the two words uttered with such contempt and power that when the ground shook this time Nura had to struggle to keep her balance.

  The child bravely thrust out her chin. “Yes, Master. Dhamon is a human, but he is the one, I believe.”

  The creature growled, as bits of rock and dust fell from overhead like the beginning of rain. “You are certain, Nura Bint-Drax? You have no doubts?”

  “He is the one.” She tipped her head, and a corner of her mouth turned slightly upward. “I have been testing him, O Very Old One.”

  “I know.” The ground vibrated softly this time, as though the creature was purring. It opened its eyes wide again, giving light to the cave interior. “Tell me of this….”

  “Dhamon Grimwulf.” Nura’s head angled back as far as she could manage, her wide child’s eyes meeting the creature’s steady gaze. “He was a Knight of Takhisis, Master, a commander of men.

  Once he rode a great blue dragon into battle, but he turned from the Dark Knights, anointed by the powerful goodness of an aging Solamnic, further touched by Goldmoon, who made him her champion. This is proof he can be swayed.”

  Nura paused, picking through the complex rumbling that followed. “Yes, Master. Dhamon Grimwulf was that man, the one who led a band of mortals to the Window to the Stars to confront the five dragon overlords. He was victorious that day, though not a single dragon died. Victorious because he took a stand and lived. A pity he did not recognize what he had achieved.” The rumbling intensified, and Nura put all her effort into keeping her balance and deciphering the words. When the ground quieted, the child waved her hands in front of her face and shook her head.

  “No, O Very Old One, he is Goldmoon’s champion no longer. He no longer struggles against the overlords. Now he has no cares beyond his own pleasure. There are very few who call him friend.”

  “A fallen hero,” the creature stated.

  “Yes, Master.”

  “A common thief.” There was a near-painful skritching sound, of something sharp being scraped across the stone, then a throaty growl that encouraged her to continue.

  “Master, I believe Dhamon Grimwulf’s spirit and honor died when he decided the dragon overlords were unstoppable. His beliefs in a better world and in himself as a catalyst to achieve that are buried deep in his heart. Hope does not exist for him.”

  The creature canted its head and gave a nod.

  “Dhamon has been battered by life… or rather by a living death that seems to pursue him and instead claim the lives of close friends and charges. To be close to Dhamon Grimwulf is to risk corruption and death, it seems.”

  She moved closer to the creature, as it lowered its great head so she could tease the barbels that hung from its chin. “A young green dragon slew his men in the Qualinesti Forest,” Nura added.

  “Then Dhamon killed his own second-in-command in the throes of drunken self-defense. Though there are many things that have gone wrong in his life, I think that act was the final blow that turned him completely inward. He has lost confidence in himself and in Krynn. Yes, he is a fallen hero, Master. But he is the one.”

  The creature closed its eyes, and the cave was plunged into darkness. Vibrations raced through the stone, intense and echoing. The child clamped her hands over her ears and stepped away. The creature rested its head on the floor, and eventually the vibrations slowed, before ceasing, to be replaced by the raspy uneven breath of its slumber. When it awoke several hours later, the child was patiently sitting nearby. The eerie light of the creature’s eyes showed Nura’s own eyes sparkling with anticipation.

  “More,” the creature stated.

  “Regarding Dhamon Grimwulf?”

  “Yes. More. You must do more so that I can be certain.” Nura digested the words and put a meaning to them. “You wish me to test him further, Master?” There was a harsh grating sound that the child understood as affirmative.

  “Indeed I shall test him more,” Nura said, the excitement thick in her voice. “I shall test him to the very limits of his existence. If he dies, I shall have been proved wrong, and I shall search for another. If he does not die, and if he can be thoroughly broken, swayed to our side, made useful….” She let the words hang in the foul air. “If this Dhamon Grimwulf can survive my tests…”

  “… then indeed he is the one,” the creature finished. It turned its head, eyes looking past Nura and to a wall of mist that was forming before the cave mouth.

  The child wheeled to see what it was the creature was observing in its magical vision. Forming across the face of the mist were trees and ferns and gently-swaying lianas, the varieties indicating the scene was far from this cave. It was night in the image, but there was the faintest hint of a flickering light.

  “It must be a torch,” the child said. A moment later her keen eyes recognized the torch-bearer, and she softly laughed. “That human woman with the red hair,” she stated, “and the dark ma
n who follows her… they are of no consequence to us.”

  The creature snarled almost imperceptibly.

  “As you wish, O Very Old One. I will attend to them. I live to serve you.”

  Chapter Two

  Fiona’s Ire

  “Damn Dhamon Grimwulf, damn him to the Abyss!” the Solamnic Knight Fiona cursed as she plunged deeper into the swamp. “If I hadn’t trusted him and his ogre friend, we’d be out of this ghastly place by now. We must be miles from Shrentak. Damn him!” She was threading her way through a tangle of vines and working to skirt a moss-choked pond. The guttering torch she carried chased shadows up trees. Chittering insects swarmed around her as she held the torch close in a futile effort to chase them away—but that only made her hotter. Despite it being well past sunset, the swamp was steamy with the brutal heat of a particularly hot summer. The heat was suffocating and had caused her to abandon her precious plate mail. Sweat plastered her long red hair against her face and glued her tattered leggings and tabard to her skin. She shrugged out of the shredded remains of her cloak and tossed it aside, a gesture which did nothing to cool her off. Her feet were so sweaty inside her leather boots that they slipped with each step, creating painful blisters.

  She breathed deep, trying to clear her lungs. Instead the heat and the moisture dug in, taking root in her chest and making her mouth and throat feel sticky. Her head pounded.

  “Fiona, wait!”

  She barely heard the words, and hadn’t realized that Rig Mer-Krel had shouted her name three times. She paused, allowing him to catch up.

  “Fiona, this is madness! We shouldn’t be traveling in the swamp at night. That torch is a beacon to whatever’s hungry and lying out there waiting for us. Might as well be ringing the cook’s bell in the galley—one sea barbarian and one Solamnic Knight served up to order. Young and lean, downright tasty!”

  She scowled and turned to face her comrade. Rig’s dark skin was slick with sweat, and his vest and pants were so wet they looked as if they were painted on him. His expression remained stern only for a moment longer, his eyes softening as they caught hers.

  “Fiona, we—”

  “It’s cooler at night,” she said stubbornly. “I want to keep going.” He opened his mouth to argue with her, then stopped himself. He knew from the set of her jaw that the words would be wasted.

  “Besides,” she continued, “I’m not tired. Not much, anyway. I want to make some progress toward Shrentak.”

  That last word sent a shiver down the mariner’s spine. The ruined city of Shrentak was the lair of Sable, the massive black dragon overlord who had turned this once-temperate land into a fetid swamp and claimed it and every creature in it as her own.

  “As long as Solamnic Knights are being held in Sable’s dungeons, I don’t want to waste time,” Fiona said. She frowned, brushing away gnats that had landed and become glued to the sweat on her face. “Perhaps my brother is there too, in Shrentak—alive, or dead, as you saw in the vision.”

  “I want to free them as much as you do, Fiona. Going after the knights—and whoever else is prisoner there—that was as much my idea as yours.”

  “Damn Dhamon Grimwulf.”

  He reached a finger up to nudge a dampened curl away from her eyes and noticed that she was holding back tears.

  “I believed him, Rig. Trusted him. He and Maldred, that… that…”

  “Ogre. I know,” he said, tracing her lower lip with his thumb. “I guess some part of me believed them, too. Or at least wanted to.”

  Weeks ago Fiona had sought out Dhamon Grimwulf, despite knowing that the once honorable hero had fallen in with thieves and worse. She needed to raise a ransom to free her brother from Sable’s clutches, and she hit upon Dhamon as the possible means to do so. After all, the Solamnic Council had refused to help. Dhamon had involved her in a certain errand for Donnag, the ogre-chieftain of Blöde. The errand, which involved killing some trolls in the mountains, yielded a chest full of coins and gems for her to use as a ransom.

  Dhamon, his friend Maldred, and forty ogre guards were assigned to escort the ransom. Rather, that’s what they said were doing. In truth, Dhamon and his friends were headed to Sable’s silver mines, where many of Donnag’s ogres were being worked to death as slaves. The chest of coins and gems was just a ruse to get her and Rig to come along and help. The ogre-chieftain had been impressed with her and the mariner’s skills and wanted to add their sword arms to the mission. It wasn’t until they reached the clearing outside the silver mine that she realized she’d been duped.

  “Tricked,” she hissed now at Rig, recalling it all so clearly.

  She would have left Dhamon and the others right then and there, and that night she ought to have stormed off to Shrentak. But she abhorred slavery, so she had decided to help free the ogres first.

  “I was lied to by Dhamon, people I had faith in.”

  They had battled spawn and draconians to free the ogres, along with a smattering of humans and dwarves also held as slaves. In the aftermath of the fight, a strange child with copper-colored hair appeared and cast a spell that trapped her and Rig and wrapped itself around Maldred and changed him. “Revealing him,” the waif had said in an eerie voice. “Chasing away the spell that paints a beautiful human form over his ugly ogre body. Revealing the son of Donnag—my mistress’s enemy!”

  When the transformation was complete, Maldred stood more than nine feet tall, an ogre more awesome and physically imposing than any of the ogres with them. His human-sized clothes fell in tatters, barely covering his massive body. Fiona stared. Maldred, the human-looking Maldred, had made her feel things for him, trust him, made her doubt her love for Rig.

  “Lies,” she repeated now bitterly to Rig. “It was all lies. The ransom was never mine to keep.

  Maldred was never human. Dhamon was never trustworthy. Lies. Lies. All of it….” Her cruel work done, the child had melted away into mists of the swamp, taking Rig’s magical glaive with her. Dhamon and Maldred announced they would escort the freed slaves back to Donnag, inviting Fiona and Rig to come with them. It would be safer. Instead, the Solamnic marched off into the swamp, Rig following. Maldred and Dhamon had called out to them for a time, until their voices grew distant and the animal and insect noises finally drowned them out.

  “Damn Dhamon Grimwulf.” Fiona whirled to resume her trek. “And Maldred, too. Damn the lying lot of them.”

  “I never did like Dhamon,” Rig muttered as he fell in step behind her. He added softly, after they had traveled only a short distance, “I would like to get my glaive back.” The ground was marshy, thick with mud and rotting plants. It pulled at their heels with each step.

  Walking was hard work, but the harsh conditions only made Fiona more determined.

  A sudden gust of wind whipped out of nowhere and extinguished her torch. The inky blackness of Sable’s swamp reached out and covered them from all directions. The air stilled. The leafy canopy high above them was so dense no hint of starlight filtered down. Everything was blackest black.

  “Fiona?”

  “Shhh.”

  “Fiona, I can’t see anything.”

  “I know.”

  “I don’t hear anything either.”

  “I know. That’s the problem.”

  The insects had stopped buzzing. The silence was unnerving. The silence, the heat, the darkness, and the dampness of the place. A prickly sensation ran down the Solamnic’s spine, a feeling that suggested someone or something was watching them. Something that could see without any problem in this cavelike blackness.

  Rig had never considered himself a man to scare easily. He had a respectable fear of the dragons and of strong storms at sea. He didn’t fear much else. Now, though, he felt a horrible, constricting fear. He considered grabbing Fiona and retreating and wondered if he could even manage to retrace his steps and find his way back to the clearing with the silver mine.

  He wondered if they might yet catch up with Dhamon and Maldred. Rig knew Fiona had to be frightened, too. He hated the notion of rejoining Maldred and Dhamon, but it would be the prudent thing to do. It was suicide to stand here practically helpless in the dark.

  The insects resumed their constant drone, and the irritating noise made them both breathe a little easier.