Thayla Mesinda slumped nearby, half-conscious, her hand still holding the Fang of Orm. Then there were strong arms around her. She was swept up in big, gentle hands and a voice said: “Drop that thing! It’s evil!”
As the Fang of Orm slipped from her fingers she looked up into concerned, sky-blue eyes. “Graywing,” she breathed. She blinked and her eyes went wide with new terror. Beyond his begrimed, bearded face, an enormous serpent descended from the swirling sky. Mouth wide, single fang dripping evil vapors, Orm struck.
The great head descended with incredible speed, and just beyond it a dragon wheeled downward, wings folded, plummeting like a falcon in stoop.
As the viper’s head reached the tower, Verden Leafglow hit the thing from behind, driving it downward. Her tons of falling fury added to the serpent’s momentum, driving the great muzzle with its extended fang as a hammer drives a nail.
Neither Lord Vulpin nor Chatara Kral ever saw the giant fang that impaled them both. Needle-sharp ivory drove through Vulpin’s mass, downward through the armored breast of the woman struggling beneath him, through paving tiles and floor structure, to imbed itself solidly in the white stone beneath-the cap of that mighty pedestal on which the entire fortress rested.
Verden Leafglow was shaken by the impact of her strike. Hitting the great viper’s skull had been like hitting a mountain. But she shook herself, flapped mighty wings, circled aloft and stooped to strike again, driving the giant head downward, the great fang deeper into its stone prison.
With a hiss that shook the landscape, Orm lunged and struggled, trying to free himself. This could not be happening again! But his fang would not budge. He roared and tugged, rearing upward, shaking from side to side, and suddenly he was loose. Free! Yet even as he realized that, he saw the gory stump of his last fang still standing above the tumbled bodies of his prey.
His shrill of anguish made hillsides dance in the distance. He raised his serpent’s head and saw a dragon before him, a tan-brown, metallic-hued dragon veering this way and that in the air, taunting him. “Go away, worm,” the dragon said. “You do not belong in this world … or in any other.”
With a final hiss, Orm withdrew. Toothless and defeated, the great viper recoiled, diminishing into the clouds from which he had come. When he was gone, the ring of storm clouds collapsed upon itself, following him into that nothingness between universes. It was a nothingness infinitely large and infinitely small, a mere suggestion of distance but now so far away that Orm could never again return.
Clout peeked out from beneath his shield, peering around with puzzled little eyes. “Wow,” he said. “Musta been some kinda storm.” Then he saw faces he recognized. All along the broken wall, gully dwarves appeared, clambering over the sundered rails to look around in confusion. “Hey ever’body!” Clout greeted them. “What ever’body doin’ here?”
“Lookin’ for Highbulp,” Gandy said, searching the area for scraps of cloth to wrap around himself. “Don’t see him,” Clout said.
“I do,” Scrib pointed. “You him. Clout th’ new Highbulp. Congrat … alla best … hey, there, Highbulp.”
“No way!” Clout yelped. He clambered out from under the Great Stew Bowl. “Not me! I don’t be Highbulp. Get somebody else!”
The Lady Bruze was beside him, then. She inspected him for breakage, decided he was unharmed, and grabbed him by the ear. “Clout is Highbulp!” she ordered. “Behave self!”
Clout let it sink in, then shook his head violently, dislodging his wife’s grasp on his ear. “No way, dear,” he said. “Won’t do it. Clout not dumb ’nough for be Highbulp. Get somebody else!”
“Who else?” Scrib asked, looking around.
At that moment Bron appeared at the stairway portal, loaded down with loot. He had swords, daggers, helmets, water jugs, several sandals, a broken spear and a large, scuffed boot. He had been foraging in the stairwell.
“Get him!” Clout pointed. “Make Bron be Highbulp. He’ll do!”
Scrib peered at the happy Bron, trying to remember whether this ground had been covered before. “How ’bout it, Bron?” he asked. “You be Highbulp?”
“No!”
“He will,” Pert interrupted. “Might as well. Nothin’ better to do.”
“Don’ wanna be Highb-” Bron tried to protest.
“Shut up, you twit,” Pert suggested. “Jus’ shut up an’ be Highbulp!”
“Yes, dear,” Bron muttered.
“Think I oughtta write this down,” Scrib mused.
Clinging to Graywing’s hand, Thayla Mesinda crept forward and looked down at the sprawled, tangled remains of the two who would have ruled the world. They lay together in death, impaled on a great, gory fang.
“Chatara Kral is dead,” the girl whispered.
“Sure is,” Graywing nodded in agreement. “Vulpin, too.”
“He never left this place,” she said. “And he pre … he came out on top.”
Graywing gazed around, listening. Then he recognized the sound that was bothering him. It was silence. The fierce fighting in the courtyards below had gone still. Still holding Thayla’s hand, he stepped to the rampart and looked down. Below, clusters of exhausted Gelnians and Tarmites stood here and there, their weapons lowered. And among them walked Dartimien the Cat, gesturing and waving, turning this way and that to hold the attention of all of them.
The city man’s voice did not carry to the top of the tower, but Graywing recognized the posture and the gestures.
“Cats always land on their feet,” the plainsman told himself. “It looks like the Vale of Sunder is about to have itself a new leader.”
Epilogue
Sheer exhaustion and clever words ended the civil war in the Vale of Sunder-the exhaustion of those who had spent their last energies in combat, and the quick, persuasive tongue of Dartimien the Cat.
The wandering mercenaries who had been the backbone of both armies were gone, and most would not return. Mercenaries fight for gain, and there was nothing to be gained where the makers of conflict were dead. Those few who might have returned on the chance of looting, changed their minds when they glimpsed a flying dragon in the distant sky above Tarmish. The dragon danced among storm clouds, plummeting again and again to strike at the wrecked tower.
Whatever was happening back there, no sane mercenary wanted any part of it.
For a time after all was quiet, Verden Leafglow patrolled the Vale of Sunder on mighty wings, fascinated by what she had encountered there. She might even have wished for further communion with the god Reorx, who had spoken to her so casually when he chose. But, godlike, Reorx had finished with her. She had served a purpose and was no longer needed. So she heard no more from the deity. It was the way of gods.
One thing she did retain, though, and with time she would come to regard it as a high prize. She was free. For the first time in her life, in two separate lifetimes, Verden Leafglow was bound by no pledge, encumbered by no obligation. Her life was her own, to live as she would, and neither a god nor any creature had claim upon her anymore.
Scarcely a hint of green remained in the coloration of her body now. Her great wings had warmed and darkened in hue to a flowing gold-brown color, deepening almost to maroon along the trailing vanes and rich umber in the folds between flexors. Her back and tail, scales and crests, were an iridescent kaleidoscope of colors-shifting light-bright rainbow hues flirting among somber browns and pale tans, laced with metallic glints of copper and gold. Her underbelly was a rich, warm brown and her eyes, once emerald, now shone like mountain crests bathed in summer sun.
Free! No longer bound by oath, pledge or even color to any enforced ethic, Verden Leafglow was free to be what she chose to be, to do as she chose to do, and she wondered if this, in itself, might be a parting gift from Reorx.