“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 man 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.