Kith-Kanan’s left shoulder bumped the wall. He was under one of the burned-out torches, and he slipped it from its bracket and sidled over to the next one, which still barely burned. He lit the stump and rushed toward the broken chair. As he did, the light from his brand fell upon Dru.
The Speaker froze in midstride, horrified. The thing perched on the chair was not an elf, nor was it a bird. It had golden-brown wings with red-tipped feathers, but instead of falcon’s claws, two white elven hands gripped the back of the chair. Instead of a falcon’s noble head, the thing was topped by a horrid mix, part elven, part bird. Dru’s face and head bore feathers where hair had been. His eyes were large and black, like a falcon’s, but set in elven eye sockets surmounted by feathery brows. Most hideous of all, instead of a nose, a large horny beak protruded from Dru’s face.
“You see,” hissed the sorcerer, “how much I need the rest of my amulet. The ring is the more powerful half, but it lacks refinement and control.” He shuddered and hunched his head down between his shoulders. The awful face seemed to reflect a spasm of pain. “I find I can’t control my transformations without the cylinder.” The bizarre white fingers flexed over the broken chair’s thick arm. “This is the last time I shall ask—give it to me!”
In reply, Kith-Kanan hurled the torch at the monster and lunged with his sword. Dru launched himself into the air, overturning the chair. He avoided Kith-Kanan’s attack, but he didn’t see Greenhands standing close by in the shadows, motionless. As he passed by, Greenhands swung his crude club. His strength was considerable, but his skill was not, and the blow was only a glancing one.
Nevertheless, Dru was sent spinning, to land in a flurry of loose feathers on the other side of the chamber, near Ulvian. “Get him! Don’t let him get up!” the Speaker cried.
He outran Greenhands to the fallen sorcerer, and he prodded the strange creature with his sword tip, ordering him to stand and surrender. The pile of feathers writhed and shifted, and a piercing shriek rose up from them. Greenhands arrived, and before their astonished eyes, the sorcerer changed shape once more.
The body of the bird lengthened, and the wings shriveled into feather-covered arms. Dru pushed himself onto his back and cried out again in agony. The beak on his white face and his black falcon’s eyes remained the same. Feathers covered the rest of his body.
“Stand up!” Kith-Kanan ordered again.
“I—I cannot,” the sorcerer wheezed. Sweat ran down his grotesque face in rivulets, and his body shook as if palsied. “I am—undone.”
Just then Ulvian groaned and shifted on the stone floor. He moved to push himself up, inadvertently distracting Kith-Kanan. In a flash, the supposedly exhausted sorcerer had tripped Kith-Kanan. The Speaker went down hard. Before anyone could draw another breath, Drulethen’s fingers locked around the Speaker’s throat.
The sorcerer stood, dragging Kith-Kanan to his feet.
Blood roared in the Speaker’s ears. The fantastic figure of the sorcerer was lost as Kith-Kanan’s vision was suffused with a red haze. He tore at the hands that were throttling him, but Dru’s grip was like iron.
“I know you have it!” he shrieked, shaking the Speaker violently. “Give me my amulet!”
Just as Kith-Kanan was losing consciousness, there was a crash and a scream. He felt himself falling, falling, until the hard floor met his back. He rolled aside, gasping, and let his vision clear. When he tried to grab for his sword, just out of easy reach, a wave of dizziness brought him down.
Greenhands was grappling with Dru. The sorcerer wasn’t as strong as the Speaker’s son, but he was infinitely more cunning. Twisting his body and breaking Greenhands’ grip, Drulethen managed to wrest the table leg club from him. The thick pine flashed down and snapped across Greenhands’ shoulders. He went reeling. Shouting with triumph, Dru picked up the Speaker’s sword, put its tip to Kith-Kanan’s throat, and felt in his clothing until he located the other half of the amulet. Kith-Kanan had secreted it beneath the breastplate of his armor.
“Ah!” Dru said, taking the black cylinder in his hand. “At last!”
“What’s happening?” Ulvian asked, pulling himself up to a sitting position. His short sleep had left him confused.
Dru had moved away. Kith-Kanan crept on hands and knees to his son. “Drulethen,” he managed to gasp.
“Father,” said Greenhands, moving stiffly to join them, “the evil one is changing again.”
Kith-Kanan staggered to his feet, retrieved his sword, and turned to face Drulethen. The sorcerer was across the room. He’d fitted the cylinder into the onyx ring he wore around his neck, and now the complete amulet dangled against his chest. His face was slowly swelling and turning purple; his feather-covered limbs were growing longer and more muscular. A slow laugh escaped his twisted lips.
“What a bargain,” he rumbled from deep in his throat. “A thousand years of power for a thousand years of servitude. That’s the deal I made with Hiddukel.” A loud snapping and cracking sounded. Dru clapped his hands to his head and howled with pain. “Now that I have my amulet whole again, the world shall tremble at my name!”
Hard, pointed plates erupted through the skin of Dru’s back. The feathers on his body dropped away as a thick tail, covered with scales, grew visibly before the elves’ astonished eyes. The sorcerer’s elven form grew and grew, hardening and thickening, until a winged, scaly monster filled the cavern deep inside Black Stone Peak.
Ulvian dragged himself close to his father. “By the gods,” he gasped, “he’s become a dragon!”
“No…a wyvern,” Kith-Kanan said. “Just like the one he rode before, terrorizing the countryside.”
The wyvern reared up twenty feet tall, green-black and glistening. Its catlike eyes were a poisonous yellow, and from its fanged jaws flicked a blood-red tongue. Horns sprouted from its head. For a moment, it looked wonderingly at its own ivory-clawed forepaws, then its wicked gaze returned to the three grouped beyond the center firepit.
“We must get out of here,” Ulvian wheezed.
“If we can. The wind spell may not let us,” answered his father. Kith-Kanan flexed both hands around the handle of his sword. He had little hope of getting close enough to kill the wyvern before it mauled him to death. He glanced at his newest son. “Greenhands can get out, though,” he said.
Ulvian looked at the unknown, white-haired elf before him. There was no time for questions or answers, as the wyvern opened its hooked, leathery beak and hissed a challenge.
“Spread out and try the tunnels!” Kith-Kanan ordered.
The prince started for the nearest passage. His limbs felt strangely leaden. To his surprise, no blast of air came out of the passage to bar his way. He ducked his head and disappeared into the tunnel.
“Go!” Kith-Kanan urged Greenhands. “Save yourself!”
“I will stay and help you, ” he resolved. “I am strong.”
The wyvern rushed the Speaker. Kith-Kanan backpedaled, slashing his sword back and forth to ward off the monster. From the side, Greenhands pried loose a paving stone in the floor and hurled it with all his might. The monster roared and hissed like a hundred boiling kettles as its left wing went limp. Its tail lashed out and swept Greenhands off his feet. The spearlike tail tip thrust at him, but the elf caught it in his hands and flung it back.
Kith-Kanan’s sword scored a bloody line down the monster’s torso. The wyvern returned its attention to the Speaker of the Sun. An iron-hard claw caught him in the chest driving all the wind from him. Had he not been wearing armor, every bone in his chest would have been crushed. Kith-Kanan hurtled back. The wyvern’s claw came down, but the Speaker drove his sword straight through the monster’s paw, pushing and pushing until black blood flooded down the blade. The wyvern bellowed in pain and snatched its claw back, taking the Speaker’s sword with it.