Everyone seemed enthralled by Nura’s voice, most of them chanting her name. Even Maldred was affected. It took all of Dhamon’s concentration to blot out the words, and try as he might he couldn’t move his feet, could barely twitch his fingers in the child’s magical webbing.
“Fight it,” Dhamon hissed to Maldred. “We need your magic to get out of here. Don’t listen to her, Mal. She might turn the lot of us into spawn.”
“Only you, dark-hair,” a nearby spawn guard corrected. “Only humans are so blessed that they can be transformed into spawn. They rest will be… abominations.” The creature locked eyes with Dhamon.
Dhamon watched as Aldor held the bowl out to Nura. Her eyes were wide and dark and flitted back and forth between Dhamon and Maldred. She dipped her fingers into the sivak blood, rapidly stirring it as she continued to recite incomprehensible words. Her voice slowed, and at the same time the sivak became agitated and the muscles in its arms and legs began to jump in time with the child’s finger motions.
A transparent red mist poured out of the bowl Nura held, flowing to the ground and slowing rolling toward the pen.
The mist thickened and darkened until it was first the shade of blood, then nearly black. Tendrils circled like coiling serpents around the legs of the ogres and Dhamon and Maldred. The mist was cool and damp, easing the heat of the swamp a little but at the same time sapping their strength. Dhamon felt the fatigue, heavy like a winter cloak. The mist wound tighter around him and seeped beneath his skin. He tried to shake it off and continued to focus his thoughts, thrusting the child out of his mind, imagining himself free.
“I can move,” Dhamon finally gasped to Maldred. “A little.”
Maldred was looking straight at Nura. “I can barely speak,” he croaked.
“Fight it. We’ve got to get out of here.”
“She’s stronger than I.”
“Fight it. Or we’re dead men.”
By the time the mist rose to their waists, Maldred had managed to move his hands. He began gesturing with his fingers, working a spell of his own. “Everything is so hard.”
“By the power of the First One,” Nura stated. “By the will of the Ancient. Give me the force to do your bidding.”
The mist around them thickened to the consistency of quicksand. The scale on Dhamon’s leg grew warm, but the sensation didn’t worsen.
Images flashed in Dhamon’s head, large yellow eyes surrounded by blackness. A dragon? There was an intelligence in the eyes, and something more that he sensed but couldn’t put a word to.
“By the power of the First One,” Nura repeated.
Again the dragon eyes flashed in Dhamon’s mind, the child’s face reflected in them. He blinked furiously, shaking off the image while at the same time trying to banish the sluggishness that threatened to overwhelm him.
Maldred was mumbling softly, his hands working faster. He risked a glance at the back of the pen. He barely made out Rikali and Varek, standing shoulder to shoulder and not moving. His attention was drawn back to Dhamon, who had become completely engulfed by the mist. Dhamon’s throat and chest tightened. It felt as if someone had reached inside him and squeezed his heart. Through the mist he glanced down at his chest. There was a symbol scrawled on it in blood. Funny, but he hadn’t felt anything, any wound. Peering about and squinting through the mist, he saw the same symbol on the chests of the elves and dwarves and Maldred. “Mmm. Mmmm.”
Dhamon was trying to say “Maldred,” but all he could get out was a strangled sound. Dhamon’s eyes widened when he spotted one of the symbols on an ogre change its shape. The blood image became a pattern of scales—small black ones that spread outward. Dhamon furiously began brushing at the symbol on his own chest, but the scale shapes were on him, too.
Images again flashed behind his eyes, the dull yellow orbs of a huge black dragon, the child reflected in them, smiling. Through the images and the magical haze he continued to brush at the symbol on his chest, fighting the unnatural fatigue and digging his fingers beneath the scales to frantically rip them out.
I will not become a spawn! He meant to shout the words, but he heard them only in his mind. I will die first!
There was more chanting, soft at first, coming from the far end of the village. Now the servants were repeating “Nura. Nura. Nura Bint-Drax.” The chanting was picked up by most of those in the pen with him.
This can’t be happening! It is not possible! Dhamon’s mind screamed. Suddenly he found his voice and heard himself screaming. “There is no dragon in this village! Only an overlord can create dragonspawn!”
Through the ever-rising mist and a gap in mutating bodies, Dhamon saw the child smile. She paused in her spell, long enough to lock eyes with him.
“The dragon is everywhere,” she said, and he heard her words over the chanting of the villagers and the hissing of the thousands of snakes.
“Nura. Nura. Nura.” The chanting grew louder. “Nura Bint-Drax.”
“I am a vessel,” she continued, speaking only to Dhamon. “One to whom the black dragon grants power.”
A vessel, Dhamon thought. He was once a vessel for the red overlord because of the scale on his leg. If the link hadn’t been broken, he’d still be Malys’s pawn. Now, perhaps, he’d become a pawn for the great black overlord.
“He grants me power to create spawn,” she persisted, her voice mocking now, “but I prefer what you call abominations. Singular creations. Interesting. And utterly loyal. Unfortunately you are human, Dhamon Grimwulf, so you will be a spawn and not an abomination.”
Dhamon heard Maldred heave in pain behind him.
Around them, some of the ogres were transforming more rapidly than the elves and dwarves. One in particular caught Dhamon’s eye, the image filling him with terror. Scales rapidly spread outward from the design on the ogre’s chest, running like water down his arms and legs, across a face that was becoming larger and was growing a horselike snout. Twin tails sprouted from his backside, one stubby and thick, the other long like a snake. A viper’s mouth snapped and hissed at the end of the snake tail, furiously trying to bite the other mutating creatures around it. Short wings extended from between the ogre’s shoulder blades, scalloped like a bat’s, but membranous like a dragonfly’s. The creature threw back his misshapen head and howled.
A half-elf nearby was growing a second pair of arms, screeching in agony and grabbing at the mist that teased its elongating claws.
The air was filled with hisses, cries of anger and disbelief, a few anguished shouts of Ogrish that Dhamon didn’t understand and some that he knew were deeply profane. There were snapping and popping sounds too, coming from limbs that were altering or new ones being birthed, bones that were breaking under stress in bodies that were growing unnaturally large and heavy and distorted. Maldred voiced a throaty growl, and now Dhamon screamed. There was intense pain in the transformation, worse than he’d ever experienced from the scale on his leg. Where the scales were spreading on his chest, it felt as if his skin had caught fire.
“No!” he shouted, as he threw all his efforts into digging out the scales, moving sluggishly, trying to get out of the mist and away from the child’s heinous spell. His legs were rooted to the ground, were difficult to budge. He moved only inches at a time. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Maldred’s fingers still twirling, saw the mist thinning around the big thief’s hands.