He knew he was being watched. He knew he should reach around and unfasten his heavy wooden shield and his battle-axe. He was a warrior, after all, hardened by years of adventure and strife.
But he stood there staring. His legs would not answer his call to retreat to the camp; his arms would not respond to his silent cries to retrieve his weapon and shield.
He saw a greater darkness beneath the flat water some distance out from shore, a blacker spot in the deep gray. The water showed no disturbance, but Ringo instinctively recognized that the blacker form was rising from the depths.
So smoothly that they didn’t even form a ripple, a pair of horns poked up through the surface thirty feet out from the bank. The horns continued to climb into the air, five feet … seven … and between them appeared the black crown of a reptilian head.
Ringo began to tremble. His hands slid from his hips and hung loosely at his sides.
He understood what was coming, but his mind would not accept it, would not allow him to shout, run, or grab his weapon, futile as he knew that weapon to be.
The horns climbed higher, and the black head slipped gently from the water beneath them. Ringo saw the ridge of sharp scales, black as a mineshaft, framing the beast’s head in armor finer than any a dwarf master smith might ever craft. Then he saw the eyes, yellow and lizardlike, and the beast paused.
The awful eyes saw him, too, he knew, and had been aware of him long before the beast had shown itself. They bored into him, framing him with their own inner light that shone as distinctively as the beam of a bull’s-eye lantern.
“Hurry it up with that water!” came the call again. “I’m wantin’ to drink and pee afore the night comes on.”
He wanted to answer.
“Ringo?”
“Heft-the-Stone, ye dolt!” another dwarf chimed in, using the nickname they had given to their principal pack mule.
The playful insult never registered in Ringo’s senses, for his thoughts were locked on those awful reptilian eyes.
Run! Ringo silently screamed, for himself and for them.
But his legs felt as if they had sunk deeply into the gripping mud. He didn’t run as the water gently parted to reveal the tapering, long snout, as long as his own body but graceful and lithe. Flared nostrils came free of the water, steam rising from them. Then came the terrible maw, water running out either side between the teeth-fangs as long as the poor dwarf’s leg. Weeds hung from the maw, too, caught on those great teeth, trailing and dripping as the head rose up above the gray flatness of the pond.
Up it rose, and as it did, the beast drifted forward, slowly and silently, so that in the span of a few moments the dragon’s head towered above the paralyzed dwarf, barely ten feet from the muddy bank.
Ringo’s breath came in short gasps. Locked by the power of those awful reptilian eyes, his head tilted back as the head rose on the black-scaled, serpentine neck. Slowly, the dragon swayed, and Ringo moved with it, though he was totally unaware of his own motion.
Beautiful, he thought, for the grace and power of the wyrm could not be denied.
There was something preternatural, some power unbound by the limitations mere mortals might know, something godlike and beyond the sensibilities of the dwarf. Gone were any thoughts of drawing a weapon against so magnificent a beast. How could he presume to challenge a god? Who was he to even dare ask such a creature to think him worthy of battle?
Transfixed, entranced, overwhelmed by the power and the beauty, Ringo barely registered the movement, the snakelike speed of the strike as the dragon’s head snapped forward, the jaws opening to fall over him.
The dragon was in the lake, swaying methodically.
There was darkness.
And Ringo knew no more.
“Bah, Heft-a-stone, will ye be quick about it, then?” Nordwinnil Fellhammer moaned, rising from his cross-legged position beside the campfire. “Suren that me lips are par-”
Nordwinnil’s words caught in his throat as he turned to regard the pond and Ringo-or the two partial legs, knee-to-foot, standing in Ringo’s boots where Ringo had just been. Nordwinnil’s eyes widened and his jaw hung open as one of those legs tipped over, falling outward to plop into the mud.
“Yeah, me own throat as-” said another of the dwarves, and he, too, abruptly cut off his sentence as he turned toward the pond and saw the gigantic black dragon crouching in the water near the shore.
The beast chomped down, and one of Ringo’s arms fell free to splash into the pond.
“D-d-d-d-dragon!” Nordwinnil screamed.
He tried to sprint out to the side but turned so furiously that he twisted his legs together and wound up tumbling headlong into the tent behind him. He thrashed and scrambled as all the dwarves began to shout. He heard a thump and knew it to be an axe slapping defiantly against a wooden shield.
The ground trembled as the beast came forth from the pond, and Nordwinnil scrambled all the more-and of course that only entangled him in the canvas all the more.
More cries assailed him, screams of fright and a growl of defiance. He heard a crossbow crank back, followed by the sharp click of the bolt’s release, the hiss of the wyrm, the abbreviated shriek of the dwarf archer, and the sloppy, crackling impact of the dragon’s fangs biting the dwarf in half.
Nordwinnil tucked his legs and drove forward as a rain of dwarf blood sprinkled over him and the tent. He finally came out on the far side and kept on scrambling, crawling on all fours.
He couldn’t shout past the lump in his throat when he heard his companions crying out, horribly shrieking, behind him. He didn’t dare look back and nearly fainted with terror when he felt a slap on his back.
But it was a dwarf, good old Pergiss MacRingle, grabbing him by the collar and dragging him along.
Good old Pergiss! Pergiss wouldn’t leave him behind.
With his friend steadying him as they went, Nordwinnil managed to get his legs under him and climb to his feet. On they ran, or tried to, for the ground shook as if an earthquake had struck. The dragon stomped down on another dwarf, crushing the poor fellow into the soft ground. Pergiss and Nordwinnil tangled up and crashed down, and both fought to regain their footing.
Nordwinnil looked back as the dragon turned their way, and those horrible eyes found him and held him.
“Come on then, ye dolt!” Pergiss cried, but Nordwinnil couldn’t move.
Pergiss looked back, and the dragon snapped its great leathery wings out wide, stealing the meager remnants of daylight with its magnificent blackness.
“By the gods,” Pergiss managed to say.
The dragon’s head shot forward just a few feet, its jaws opened wide, and it blew forth a spray of green-black acidic spittle.
Nordwinnil and Pergiss lifted their arms before them to fend off the deadly rain, but the sticky, burning substance engulfed them.
They screamed. They burned. They melted together so completely that anyone who happened upon the scene would never know where Nordwinnil ended and Pergiss began.
There was silence again by the still pond near Palishchuk. The buzzards watched with interest, but they dared not take wing and caw.
He was Kazmil-urshula-kelloakizilian. He was Urshula, the black wyrm of Vaasa, the Beast of the Bog, the bane of all who thought to civilize this untamable land. He had razed entire villages in his youth. He had decimated towns so completely that those who subsequently returned to the scene could not know that structures had once stood there. Tribes of goblins had paid homage to him, sacrificed to him, and carried his likeness on totems.
In his youth, those centuries before, Urshula had dominated the region from the Galena Mountains in the south and running up the eastern border to the base of the Great Glacier that described Vaasa’s northern edge.