She climbed to her feet and scrubbed her face with one hand. It surprised her that the hand hurt. A tinderbox in the pack lit a spare torch and gave Linsha light to examine her hands. Both were scraped and lacerated from her fall, and further examination revealed a tear in the leg of her new pants and bruises on her legs and abdomen.
“Great,” Linsha grumbled to herself.
“What is?” asked the governor, sitting up. “This rock bed that has disagreed so strenuously with my back?”
Linsha sniffed. At least he had the decency to be stiff this morning. His endurance and strength were beginning to make her feel like an old woman. “I’ve torn my uniform already,” she said irritably and pointed to the damage. “And worst of all, Your Excellency, I fell asleep on duty.”
Lord Bight lifted his shoulders in a shrug, although he was secretly pleased she had confessed. “I told you to, remember? Don’t sweat it.” He didn’t tell her about his small part in helping her to sleep.
They ate a quick meal, lit a second torch, and set out again on the faint path under the mountain. The cavern of fire fell away behind them, its rumble fading to a trembling silence, its heat giving way to bone-chilling cold. Linsha estimated they had passed beyond Mount Ashkir and were somewhere under the southern mountains, and yet where they were going, Lord Bight still would not say. They walked and climbed for hours along the underground path in a steady march south. At what felt like noon, they took a break to eat and rest and then pushed on again harder than before. As if he sensed a deadline approaching, Lord Bight set a fast pace, and from the ease that he found his way through the bewildering passages and caves, Linsha realized he had been this way before, probably many times.
It was nearly sunset when Lord Bight struck a passage that sloped steadily upward and led Linsha toward the surface. They entered a long, flat-roofed cavern with a broad floor, and they saw a slit of daylight gleaming at the far end. Both of them hurried forward, eager to be out of the oppressive darkness. The light grew brighter the closer they drew, and they tossed their torches aside and began to run. Their run turned to a sprint, and, laughing in relief, they plunged into the sun and wind of early evening.
Linsha threw her arms wide and collapsed on a sward of grass. She inhaled the perfume of sun-warmed grasses and wild flowers and the tang of pine and cedar. A breeze stirred among the trees, and insects trilled noisy songs in the grass.
The cave exited into a narrow valley strewn with broken rock and copses of mountain pine. The valley ran roughly north and south down the flanks of a reddish peak that still gleamed a fiery bronze in the ruddy light of the setting sun. Linsha didn’t recognize the peak, but she judged from the distance they had traveled that they were on the south side of the range that hemmed in Sanction. And the only thing on this side of the mountains was the swampy domain of the black dragon, Onysablet.
Her delight evaporated. A cold lump of apprehension settled in Linsha’s belly. She shook off the bits of grass on her clothes and climbed to her feet. Lord Bight had walked to an outcropping and stood looking south.
“Your Excellency, why are we here?” she ventured.
He continued to look south. “To meet a contact. Do not fear. As long as you are with me, you will go unharmed.”
“What contact?”
He turned around, the pleasure turned to ashes in his eyes. His broad face was set in a grim mask. “I am going to summon a dragon. One who considers herself a scientist of sorts.”
“Sable,” hissed Linsha. Instinctively she scanned the southern horizon for a sign of the monstrous black.
The man, still carrying his wooden box, began striding down the valley. “Leave the pack and come. We need to hurry.”
“Lord Bight… this is stupid. Even if the black comes, she won’t help us,” Linsha yelled after him.
“Young woman,” he shouted back, “trust me!”
Linsha hesitated for a few heartbeats, long enough for several alternate courses of action to run through her mind and be rejected in the face of too many truths. He had brought her this far, he had saved her life, and she was still his bodyguard and honor bound to defend him no matter how stupid he was behaving. Not to mention the fact that the Clandestine Circle would sell its collective soul to know how Lord Bight managed to fend Sable off his territory. Witnessing this meeting could be the chance she’d been waiting for.
Muttering under her breath, she tossed the pack and the spare torches into a clump of bushes by the outcropping and sped after him. He marched downhill at a ground-eating pace for over a mile while Linsha jogged to keep up with him. She spent the time pondering the possibility that he had suddenly suffered a mental breakdown. Summon Sable? That was lunacy.
The valley ended abruptly on the flat head of a broad, treeless plateau. Lord Bight crossed it and came to a quick halt at the rim, where the ground dropped away in a breathtaking cliff. Several hundred feet below, the base of the cliff formed the wall of a small canyon that contained a dark, brackish stream.
Linsha, coming up beside Lord Bight, looked down and saw where the stream meandered out of the canyon into a low range of hills. Dusk approached, and the sky was filled with mellow light that cast a pale glow on the murky terrain below. The governor pointed south. She followed his motion and stared out beyond the hills to the sunken fringes of the watery realm of the dragonlord, Onysablet. The largest black dragon left after the Purge, Sable laid claim to this land that had once been the foothills and verdant grasslands of Blöde, and she reshaped the landscape to fit her will, crushing the level of the land and bringing in the waters. The ogres who lived here had been driven into remote mountain strongholds in the southern Khalkists, and now, more than twenty years after her arrival, only a few scattered high points of land remained dry above the largest swamp on Krynn, and the once high foothills of the southern Khalkists were nothing more than rocky points jutting out of the drowned land.
Linsha shuddered. The destruction and waste of such a huge area filled her soul with rage. She crossed her arms and glared at Lord Bight. “So how do you call a dragon who is probably miles away and busy making more swamp?”
“Like this.” He pulled a thin chain out from under his tunic and palmed a slim silver whistle. His eyes closed, and his face took on a tense mask of deep concentration. He took a few deep breaths then blew a long note on the whistle.
At least Linsha assumed there was a note. She did not hear a thing. “You’re joking.”
He glanced at her, his eyes crinkling at the corners, and blew more air through the instrument. “There is more to this whistle than meets the eye. Now, look that way,” he told Linsha, a finger pointing southeast.
The sun’s red disk slipped to the horizon on their right, and shadows crept out of the stagnant swamp. The wind blew stronger over the plateau, burdened with the smells of rot and mud and marsh grass.
Linsha waited, her heart pounding, her eyes fastened on the darkening skyline. The sun slipped lower, and a few stars, like tiny shards of crystal, peeped through the dusky twilit sky.
A small black dot appeared just above the hazy dark line of the swamp’s horizon. Linsha had to look twice to see it. It looked like a bird in the distance, but as it sped nearer it grew larger and larger until the black shape became a dragon that roared over the swamp like a storm cloud. Monstrous and dark as the bog she sprang from, Sable flew past the boundaries of her watery realm, over the barren line of hills, and swept over the plateau. She circled overhead, her great head swiveling to stare at the humans who had the audacity to disturb her. The wind of her passing flattened the grass on the plateau and sent dust and grit swirling.