He thought he remembered the dragon telling him that his mind was more powerful than his body. He knew his body was very strong indeed.
“I’ll use my mind to fight you. Leave me now,” he said. His voice sounded strange, unfamiliar, deep and exotic. “Get out of my head!”
Dhamon concentrated all of his mental energy. He reached deep down inside, finding a spark he hadn’t known existed, kindling and nourishing it.
It felt like pushing a boulder, but after what seemed like an eternity, the boulder began to budge.
He shoved the boulder down the side of the mountain, out of sight and out of mind, then sat back on a flat rock, took a deep breath, and opened his eyes. The shadow dragon was gone, but he knew precisely where to find the beast.
Maldred was suddenly back, at his side, eyes unblinking, but almost moist with tears.
“Aye, my old friend. It’s too late for me,” Dhamon said. His voice still seemed so strange to his own ears. “There will be no cure.”
Maldred stammered something, but Dhamon waved the words away. He rose, discovering that he was very tall now and stood nearly eye-to-eye with the big ogre-mage.
“It’s too late now, and I’m going to damn well make sure it’s too late for the shadow dragon, too.” He knew the shadow dragon would be waiting for him, that it wanted him to come—to gloat, to punish him, to finish his condemnation.
“Dhamon, I will help you. You can still try….”
The mountain range rumbled again, smothering Maldred’s pleading and forcing both of them to leap behind a huge boulder to avoid falling rocks. When the tremors died down, the face of the mountainside had changed again.
“The shadow dragon knows I’m coming,” Dhamon said, when it was over, “and he wants me to come. He wants to punish me, wants revenge, and he wants to slay my mind and use my body as his puppet.” He paused, staring up at the mountain with eyes that could now see tiny details in sharp focus.
“But I want revenge, Maldred. So I’ll come to him all right, and let my cure be damned.”
Nestled deep in the cave, the shadow dragon growled gently, nonetheless sending a ripple of tremors through the rock.
In her little girl guise, Nura Bint-Drax padded forward. “You are pleased, master?”
The dragon slowly nodded. “Dhamon Grimwulf comes. Before the day is out, he will find our lair. He is ready, Nura Bint-Drax. Finally ready.”
“We are ready, too,” Nura Bint-Drax said in her woman’s voice. “And anxious.” She busied herself gathering all the magical treasures they’d accumulated from Dark Knight storehouses and elsewhere, methodically placing them near to the shadow dragon and between its claws. “Very, very anxious.”
Chapter Eighteen
Ragh’s Goblin Brigade
The goblins followed Ragh closely. Each bore an expectant look on his smashed-in face. Yagmurth was especially happy, his smile showing off yellowed, broken teeth. The draconian had to ward off the stench from his army, raising his head toward fresh air.
Fiona purposefully stood downwind. However, she was interested in Yagmurth, who seemed to carry himself with confidence and speak louder than the rest. The smallest goblins had the thinnest voices, and one scrawny, brown one sounded like a mewling cat. For the most part, the bigger the goblin, the more noise it made and the greater its stink.
The female Knight watched their expressions and listened to their craggy voices. She picked out occasional words in the common tongue—words that either didn’t exist in the goblin language or were universal in all languages: “sivak,” “Takhisis,” “general.”
“General?” she repeated to herself, cocking her head and noticing that the one who kept saying “General” was now watching her closely. “General… who?”
This goblin separated himself from the pack. He was nearly three feet tall, with a nose that reminded her of a turnip and skin the color of rust. His eyes seemed too large for his pug nose, and his hair fell in scattered patches of uneven lengths. There was a bone ring in the goblin’s right ear, from which dangled two bluejay feathers and a clay bead.
She sucked in her breath in an effort not to chuckle at the strange-looking creature.
“General,” the goblin said, followed by a string of nonsensical—to her—clicks and snarls. “General.”
“Yes, General. Forgive me for speaking aloud. I had no intention of drawing your attention. Go away.”
The little, strange-looking goblin didn’t go away. In fact, he drew nearer. The goblin babbled animatedly, including the word “General” a few more times. The goblin’s voice yipped excitedly, reminding her of a small and annoying dog. The goblin clearly wanted her to say something in response, but she raised her lip in a snarl to quiet the thing.
“Ragh!” Fiona called. “Your goblin friends are bothering me. Can’t you do something with your ‘army’?”
The draconian shouted in the goblin tongue for them all to quiet down.
Instantly, the old goblin named Yagmurth thumped the haft of his spear against the ground, calling all his fellows to attention. Then he gently thwacked the haft against Ragh’s leg. When the draconian looked down, Yagmurth started chattering loudly.
“I know,” Ragh answered in their guttural tongue. “You are waiting for me to lead you against the hobgoblins and their leader General Kruth. But I, the greatest of Takhisis’ creations, believe there might be a better, slyer way of winning the day.”
The draconian registered the disappointment on the goblins’ faces. Yagmurth thumped the spear again.
“Perfect child,” Yagmurth asked in the goblin tongue. “How is there a better way than battle?”
Ragh shrugged his shoulders. Years before he fell in with Dhamon, Ragh settled nearly all his problems by combat. There were a few exceptions. For example, he had learned if his problem was bigger and nastier than himself, it was wise to avoid a fight.
“There are always alternatives to fighting,” Ragh dissembled smoothly. “This is an opportunity that calls for stealth and intelligence—two things I’ll bet you have plenty of, and two things I’m certain your hobgoblin enemies have never heard of.”
The goblins swelled with pride. By the tone of their excited voices and expressions, even Fiona could tell they were won over by Ragh’s flattery and listened to his plan. As he huddled with his army, Fiona, tired of their banter and their stink, stepped away from the crowd and held her own strategy session—with the sword.
“I seek revenge,” she told it. “I seek….”
The sword gave her the answer she sought.
“Fiona.” The draconian stamped his foot. “Fiona!”
She looked up, frowning to note that the draconian had interrupted her dialogue with the sword. The draconian was watching her closely. In truth, Ragh remained half-afraid the female Knight, in her madness, might lash out at him or the goblins.
She twisted her head to look at Ragh, raising an eyebrow. “What?”
“We need your help.”
The frown disappeared, replaced by an almost wistful expression, but her eyes looked distracted, flitting over Ragh and then shifting away, studying something in the distance that perhaps only she could see. “You need my help with your plan?”
He nodded.
“Oh, yes, you need me,” Fiona agreed. “That’s why I stayed with you, sivak. You need me because I look human. I’m the only one who can walk into that village and scout what’s happening, see where Riki and Varek and Dhamon’s baby are, how they are doing. I can see if they know that they’re in serious danger if they stick around this place.”