“Rikali’s being taken to this village called Polagnar. If we move quickly, we might catch up to her and Elsbeth before they get there.” Maldred replaced the scroll, then put the tube back in his pocket.
“Fine.” Dhamon shook his head. “Let Varek here go after his wife. It’s well out of our way. There’s the Screaming Valley to consider, Mal. The sage I need to find.” Dhamon’s eyes were unblinking, his jaw firm. “We’re not going into the swamp after Riki. She’d understand.”
Varek cut Dhamon a withering glare and gripped his quarterstaff tight. “Ungrateful,” he snorted. He set off down the road at a jog, heading in the direction of Polagnar, using the moonlight to guide him.
“Wife,” Dhamon muttered sarcastically. “I’ll just bet they’re husband and wife. He’s dreaming. Riki would no more marry that boy than—”
“We’re going with him, Dhamon,” Maldred cut in. “To Polagnar. We’re going to find Riki. Maybe she is his wife. Maybe she isn’t. But she’s family to us.”
“No. No, we’re not. We’re going straight south.” Dhamon shook his head again. “Mal, I—”
The big man growled and whirled on his friend, hand shooting out and grabbing a hank of Dhamon’s hair and pulling him close.
“What are you thinking?” The words were spat out forcefully and with a trace of venom. “Not go after Riki? She saved our lives by coming to that ogre town. Saved your life when that wench was going to slit your throat. You owe her. We owe her.”
Dhamon’s jaw worked and his hands knotted into tight fists, but he said nothing.
“We’ll get through the Screaming Valley and find the treasure. Then we’ll find the sage,” Maldred continued, “but not until we find Riki.” He released Dhamon and tromped after Varek, not looking to see if his friend was following.
Chapter Seven
Scales
The marshy ground grabbed at Dhamon’s boot heels as he slogged through a thickening cypress grove. Varek and Maldred were a few yards ahead of him, talking. In the younger man’s voice was a decided urgency. Occasionally Maldred turned and said something to Dhamon, though Dhamon didn’t answer—he was paying less attention to his companions’ words than to the persistent soft chitter of the cloud of insects that surrounded them. Dhamon was thinking about the mysterious healer to whom the enchanted map pointed.
“The pirate treasure first,” he said to himself, “if it exists.” Use as much of it—all of it if necessary—to buy the sorceress’s cure. “If she exists,” he added, though he hadn’t meant to speak aloud.
“What did you say, Dhamon?” This from Maldred, who had stopped at the edge of a sodden clearing.
“I said I’ll take first watch,” Dhamon returned. “Sun’s setting. I don’t fancy walking through this bog in the dark. Especially since we’ve got no torches.”
Faint stars began appearing by the time Varekand Maldred were asleep. Dhamon sat with his back to a spindly shaggybark. He could hear Maldred snoring, a chorus of crickets, and from a tall mossdraped poplar a parrot softly scolded them for intruding in its territory. For the briefest of moments Dhamon considered stealing the enchanted map from his large friend and getting down to the business of finding the treasure and then the sorceress—maybe they would both prove hollow fantasies. “Let Maldred and Varek find Riki,” he softly mused. “They don’t need my help with that task. I don’t need to waste time… by all the vanished gods, please not now!”
His right leg had begun to throb, gently at first. Within the passing of a few moments, the pain grew intense and his body feverish. He shakily stood and stumbled away from the marshy clearing, following the path of a small stream to the east for nearly a mile until his chest grew so tight and his legs so numb he could no longer walk. He stumbled down a low rise and into the night-cooled water, then struggled to pull himself up on the muddy bank. He pressed his hands against his thigh, feeling, through the worn fabric of his trousers, the scale as hard as steel.
“Damn this thing!” he softly cursed, “and damn me!” Icy cold waves pulsed outward from the scale now, as if Dhamon had been plunged into a frigid sea. His teeth chattered, and he curled into a ball, though he gained no warmth from the position.
The sensation persisted until he felt he could endure no more and until he nearly passed out, then began to dissipate, slowly, and after interminable moments he felt warm again. He gulped the late summer air into his lungs and labored to stand, the slippery mud pulling him down. His questing fingers found a vine, and he tugged himself to his feet.
For an instant he considered returning to Maldred and Varek, though he loathed the notion of looking helpless in front of them. Suddenly he felt warmer still. Jolts of heat stabbed into his leg where the scale was embedded, regular and pulsing like the erratic beat of a heart not his own. The heat intensified, and he clenched his fists, fingernails digging deep into his palms, in an effort to deny the agony. He felt blood on his hands but no pain. The wounds he inflicted on himself were insignificant compared to what the scale was doing to him.
“No,” he breathed. “Stop this.” He continued to stagger east along the stream, chanting the words, as if they might chase away the pain. After several more steps he crumpled, slipping on a oily patch of sawgrass and falling on his back, sliding down the sloping bank headfirst until his heel caught on a root. His hair hung in the water.
The heat again mounted, and the jolts quickened until he was gasping for air. His limbs trembled. He was unable to control them, and his arms flopped about as he prayed for unconsciousness, death, anything to relieve the pain. He rolled until his face was in the water, and he retched, emptying his stomach of the little food he’d consumed today. Then he summoned what strength he had, raised his head, and slammed it down against a rock, cutting himself and adding a dull ache to his miseries. He raised his head again, felt the root tug free, and felt himself sliding all the rest of the way down the bank, spinning until he was laying on his back immersed in the stream. It was shallow in this spot, the water only lapping over his shoulders and rising halfway up on his face. Some part of him registered that it was pleasantly cool, but it did nothing to cut the allconsuming heat. By now Dhamon was trembling all over. He cursed himself for losing control to the pain, and he cursed the Dark Knight and the dragon who put him in this vulnerable and tortured state.
His mind propelled him back to a forested glade in Solamnia. He was kneeling over a Dark Knight he had mortally wounded, holding the man’s hand and trying to offer what comfort he could in the last moments of the man’s life. The man beckoned him closer, loosed the armor from his chest and showed Dhamon a large blood-red scale embedded in the flesh beneath. With fumbling fingers, the knight managed to pry the scale free, and before Dhamon realized what was happening, the knight had placed it against Dhamon’s thigh.
The scale molded itself around his leg, feeling like a brand thrust against his unprotected skin. It was the most painful sensation Dhamon had experienced in his young life. Worse than the pain was the dishonor: Malys, the red dragon overlord whose scale it was, used the scale to possess and control him. Months went by before a mysterious shadow dragon, along with a silver dragon called Silvara, worked ancient magic to break the overlord’s control. The scale turned black in the process and shortly thereafter it had begun to ache periodically.
At first, the pain was infrequent, fleeting, and tolerable. Certainly it was preferable to being controlled by a dragon. Gradually the spasms grew worse and lasted longer. He had sought a cure numerous times from mystics and sages, from old men who peddled bottles filled with all manner of stinking concoctions. He had sought Tanis’s sword, because it was said to find lost and elusive things for its wielder. Dhamon had told it to find him a cure. Instead it cursed him with unfathomable visions.