Dragons of the Highlord Skies Read online

Kitiara made a slight sound, a sort of strangled gasp.

  “Do you recognize these criminals?” Ariakas demanded, turning to her.

  Kitiara composed her features in an instant. She smiled her crooked smile and said, “I am afraid not, my lord.”

  “You better not,” said Ariakas grimly. “If I find out that you had something to do with Verminaard’s death—”

  “I assure you, my lord, I know nothing about it,” Kitiara said with a shrug.

  Ariakas regarded her intently, trying to dissect her. Assassination was one means of rising to higher rank in the Dark Queen’s army, viewed as a way to provide the strongest possible leadership. But Ariakas had valued Verminaard and Kitiara did not want to be accused of having arranged the man’s death, especially when the loss of the kingdom of Thorbardin had been the disastrous result.

  “Solace has a population of several thousand, my lord,” Kitiara said, growing annoyed. “I did not know every man in town.”

  Ariakas stared at her and she met his gaze unflinchingly. At last, he let her off the hook.

  “No, but I’ll bet you slept with half of them,” he said, and turned his attention back to Grag.

  Kitiara smiled dutifully at his lordship’s jest, but her smile vanished when he was no longer watching her. She leaned back against the table, her arms folded, her gaze abstracted.

  “Where are these assassins now, Commander?” Ariakas asked.

  “The last I heard of them, they were hiding in Thorbardin, my lord.” Grag hesitated, then said, with a curl of his lip, “I believe the hobgoblin who styles himself Fewmaster Toede can provide you with more information about them.”

  Kitiara stirred slightly. “If your Lordship would like, I could travel to Pax Tharkas, talk to this Fewmaster.”

  “The Fewmaster is not in Pax Tharkas, my lady,” said Grag. “That fortress is in shambles and is no longer defensible. The Red Wing has relocated to the city of Haven.”

  “I will go to Haven, then,” Kitiara said. “Perhaps later,” Ariakas told her. “Solamnia takes priority.”

  Kitiara shrugged again and subsided back into her reverie.

  “As for these assassins,” Ariakas continued, “they will most likely remain skulking in the caves of Thorbardin through the coming winter. We will hire some dark dwarf—”

  “I wouldn’t be too sure of that,” Kitiara interrupted.

  “What do you mean?” Ariakas turned to glare at her. “I thought you didn’t know these men!”

  “I don’t, but I know their type,” she said, “and so do you, my lord. They are most likely rovers, itinerant sellswords. Such men never remain in one place long. Rest assured, they will soon be on the move. A little snow will not stop them.”

  Ariakas gave her a strange look, one she did not see, for she was staring down at the toes of her dust-covered boots. He regarded her in silence a moment longer, then turned back to Grag.

  “Find out from your agents all you can about these men. If they do leave the dwarven halls, report to me at once,” Ariakas scowled, “and put the word out that I want them captured alive. The death of a Dragon Highlord will not go unpunished. I plan to make an example of them.”

  Grag promised he would find out all he could. He and Ariakas spent some time talking about the war in the west and who should take over command of the Red Wing. Grag was impressed by the fact that Ariakas knew all about the Red Wing’s status, the disposition of its forces, the need for supplies, and so forth.

  They discussed Pax Tharkas. Ariakas said he had considered retaking it, but given that the fortress was in ruins, he had decided that it would not be worth the effort. His armies would simply go around it.

  All this time, Kitiara remained silent and preoccupied. Grag thought she wasn’t listening until he mentioned—with another curl of his lip—Fewmaster Toede’s ambition to become the successor to Verminaard. At that, Kitiara smiled.

  Grag did not like to see her smile. He feared she was going to advocate promoting Toede, and Grag did not want to take orders from the bloated, arrogant, self-serving hob. Although, on second thought, having Toede for a commander might be better than some arrogant human numbskull. Toede could be manipulated, flattered, and cajoled into doing what Grag wanted, whereas a human commander would go his own way. Grag would have to think about this.

  The discussion ended soon after. Grag was dismissed. He saluted and walked out the door, which Ariakas shut behind him. Grag found to his amazement that he was trembling and he had to stop a moment to regain his composure.

  Once he was himself again, Grag confronted the ogres, who appeared surprised to see him return all in one piece. They handed over his sword and knife in silence, regarding him with more respect.

  “Is there a tavern close by?” Grag asked. He held the sword belt in his hand. He wasn’t at all sure he could buckle it without fumbling and he wouldn’t give the ogres the satisfaction of seeing his weakness. “I could use a shot of dwarf spirits.”

  The ogre guards grinned.

  “Try the Hairy Troll,” one said, pointing in the tavern’s general direction.

  “Thanks,” said Grag and walked off, still carrying his sword belt.

  There was no doubt in his mind. The Blue Lady knew the assassins, and Ariakas knew she knew—or at least suspected it.

  Grag would not have been in her boots for all the dwarf spirits in Thorbardin.

  2

  Kitiara’s strategy.

  Ariakas’s scheme. The witch.

  ou know, I’ve half a mind to promote that Grag to Dragon Highlord,” said Ariakas, gazing speculatively after the departing draconian.

  “A draco?” Kitiara was amused. “The lizard-boys are excellent fighters, to be sure, my lord. They were bred for battle after all, but they lack the brains and discipline needed for command.”

  “I’m not so sure,” said Ariakas. “Commander Grag has a good head on his scaly shoulders.”

  “He’s smarter than Verminaard, at least,” Kitiara muttered.

  “I remind you that I highly valued Verminaard,” stated Ariakas heatedly. “His campaign in the west was brilliantly conducted. Any man—no matter how powerful—can fall victim to fate.”

  Kitiara shrugged and stifled another yawn. She hadn’t slept much the night before, her sleep broken by disturbing dreams of a fire-ravaged keep and an undead knight clad in blackened armor adorned with a rose. Kitiara had no idea what the dream meant or why she had dreamt it, but she had woken suddenly, filled with an unnamed fear, unable to return to sleep.

  Ariakas didn’t look as if he’d slept well himself. His eyes had dark circles beneath them and he blinked them constantly. Kit wondered uneasily if her dream had been a dream or if Takhisis was trying to tell her something. Kit was about to ask Ariakas when he startled her by saying, “Or was it fate, Kitiara?”

  “Was what fate, my lord?” Kitiara asked, confused. She’d completely forgotten the subject of their conversation.

  Ariakas exploded. “By Takhisis, I begin to think you were the one to have Verminaard killed! Quite a coincidence, these assassins coming from your hometown, and one of them a wizard. You had a brother who was a wizard, as I recall.”

  “I am flattered that your lordship remembers so much about me,” said Kitiara coolly. “As for my brother the mage, Raistlin is only my half-brother and he was always weak and sickly. I doubt if he is even still alive, much less given to going about assassinating Dragon Highlords.”

  Ariakas glowered at her.

  “Are you accusing me of Verminaard’s murder, my lord?” Kit flared.

  “What if I am?” demanded Ariakas.

  He crowded close to her, using his massive body to physically intimidate her. Kitiara was shaken and for a moment she almost gave way to panic. She had been telling him the truth, but she wasn’t telling him all the truth. She should never have made that crack about Verminaard. At that moment she was reminded of her father’s teachings. Gregor uth Matar had once been a Solamnic knight. D
ismissed from the knighthood for disgraceful behavior, he’d made a living by selling his sword to the highest bidder. Gregor had been a handsome, bold womanizer, always in debt, frequently in trouble, and Kitiara had adored him. One of his dictums—always attack, never defend.

  Instead of falling back, as Ariakas anticipated, Kitiara moved in closer, so that they were practically toe-to-toe.

  “You should know me well enough, my lord, to know that if I wanted to assassinate Verminaard, I would have done it myself. I would not have paid to have it done for me.”

  Ariakas seized hold of her jaw. His fingers clenched. A single move and he could have broken her neck. He stared down at her, waiting for her to whimper and weaken.

  Kit did not so much as blink and suddenly Ariakas felt a tickling sensation, as of sharp steel, in the area of his groin. He looked down and was startled to see Kitiara’s hand holding a knife, prepared to thrust it through the leather skirt into a very sensitive part of his anatomy.

  Ariakas gave a great guffaw of laughter and shoved Kitiara away from him.

  “Damn those guards of mine for slackers,” he said, half-amused, half-infuriated. “I’ll have their heads for this! They have orders to search everyone—even my most trusted commanders! Or perhaps I should say especially my most trusted commanders.”

  “Do not blame the ogres, my lord,” said Kitiara. “They were not meant to find this.”

  She took the thin-bladed knife and slipped it into a hidden sheath that had been cleverly worked into the ornate design of her dragon armor breastplate.

  Ariakas chuckled. “Would you really have stabbed me?”

  “Would you have broken my neck?” Kitiara returned in arch tones.

  Both knew the answer was “yes”. They expected nothing less of each other.

  “Now perhaps we can turn our attention to matters in Solamnia.” Ariakas walked over to the desk where he had spread out a map. He bent over it.

  Kitiara breathed an inward sigh. She’d survived yet another confrontation with her powerful master. Her boldness and daring had pleased him. The day would come, though, when they wouldn’t.

  “Did you have a strange dream last night, my lord?” Kitiara asked.

  “Don’t try to change the subject,” Ariakas said curtly.

  “I did,” Kitiara continued. “I dreamt Queen Takhisis was trying to persuade me to travel to Dargaard Keep to confront the death knight who is supposed to reside there.”

  “Soth,” Ariakas said. “Lord Soth. What did you tell Her Dark Majesty?”

  He tried to sound casual, but Kitiara knew then that he’d had the same dream.

  “I told her I didn’t believe in ghosts,” Kitiara returned dryly.

  Ariakas grunted. “Soth is no ghost. He lives—if you can say such a thing about a man who has been dead for over three hundred years. Our Queen wants to recruit him to our cause.”

  “Would you do that, my lord?” Kitiara asked.

  Ariakas shook his head. “Soth would be a valuable ally, but I could not trust him. He is far too powerful. Why should a death knight call any mortal ‘master’? No, let Soth brood over his wrongs in his ruined castle. I want no part of him.”

  Kitiara had to admit his reasoning was sound. Queen Takhisis was often impatient with human frailties and weakness, and she could be impractical on occasion. Kit put the dream aside

  “I read your latest proposal for Solamnia,” Ariakas was saying. He picked up a thick sheaf of parchment. “You propose that the Blue Wing seize the High Clerist’s Tower, occupy it, and from there march on Palanthas. A daring plan, Kitiara.”

  He took his seat behind the desk. “I am against it. It stretches our forces too thin, but I will listen to what you have to say.”

  Kitiara perched her hip on the edge of the table and leaned over to explain her idea.

  “My spies tell me the High Clerist’s Tower is manned by only a few troops, my lord.” She put her finger on the map. “The Red Wing is here. You could order the Red Wing north. We could strike the High Clerist’s Tower with troops and dragons from the Red Wing and the Blue Wing. We could easily wipe out the small force holding it, seize the High Clerist’s Tower, and occupy it before the Solamnic knights knew what hit them. From there, we march on Palanthas, conquer the city and take over her seaports.”

  “Taking Palanthas will not be easy,” said Ariakas. “We cannot lay siege to the city, not without blockading her seaports.”

  “Bah! The Palanthians are soft and pampered dandies. They don’t want to fight. They might break a nail. Once the Palanthians see dragons flying in the skies, they will be so terrified they will piss their pants and surrender.”

  “What if they don’t?” Ariakas pointed to the map. “We do not yet control the Plains of Solamnia, nor Elkholm, nor Heartland. You leave your flanks exposed, surrounded by the enemy. What about supply lines? You may take the fortress, but once you are inside, your troops would starve!”

  “When Palanthas is ours, we resupply from there. In the meantime, we have red dragons ferry in what we need.”

  Ariakas snorted. “The reds will not be used as pack mules! They will have nothing to do with such an arrangement.”

  “If her Dark Majesty were to order them—”

  Ariakas shook his head.

  Kitiara sat back. Her lips pursed, her brown eyes glinted. “Then, my lord, we will carry our supplies with us and make do with that.” Her fist clenched in her enthusiasm and passion. “I guarantee you that once people see your banner raised over the High Clerist’s Tower, Palanthas will fall into our hands like rotten fruit!”

  “It is too risky,” Ariakas muttered.

  “Yes, it is risky,” Kitiara agreed eagerly, “but there is a greater risk in allowing the knights time to organize and send in reinforcements. Right now, the Knighthood is in turmoil. They have no Grand Master, for no man is strong enough to claim it, and they have two High Justices because two men claim the position and neither will acknowledge the rights of the other. They are running around like sailors on a burning deck quarreling over whose job it is to put out the fire and all the while, their ship is sinking.”

  “That may be true,” said Ariakas, “but the Knighthood is still a powerful force in Solamnia and so long as the knights are around, the Solamnic people will never give up. The knights must be utterly destroyed, the knighthood vanquished. I want them crushed, shattered, and so demoralized they can never recover.”

  “That will happen if we rout the knights at the High Clerist’s Tower,” Kitiara argued. “If Palanthas falls due to the feeble folly of the knights, the people will turn from them in fury and disgust. The people already distrust them. The loss of the High Clerist’s Tower and the invasion of Palanthas would be the final blow. The knighthood would crumble to dust.”

  Seeing Ariakas thinking this over, Kitiara pressed home her point.

  “My lord,” she said, “we use the blue dragons to strike like a thunder bolt falling from the heavens. We hit the knights quickly and we hit them hard before they ever see us coming. Give the command and my dragons can be ready to attack within the week!”

  She paused to let this sink in, then said quietly, “It is said that the High Clerist’s Tower has never fallen while men of faith defend it. The men guarding the Tower have lost their faith and we must not give them the opportunity to find it. We must strike before the knights raise up a champion who will bring the feuding factions together.”

  Ariakas mulled this over. Her arguments were persuasive. He liked the idea of a swift, brutal attack on the under-manned tower. The knights would be demoralized. Palanthas would undoubtedly surrender, and he needed her wealth and her fleet of white-winged ships. The trade in slaves alone would send steel coins flooding into his coffers.

  Ariakas was about to agree and then he looked into Kitiara’s eyes. He saw what he wanted to see in the eyes of one of his commanders: the lust for battle. But he saw something else there, too—something that gave him pause. He saw smu
g certainty. He saw ambition.

  She would be lauded and celebrated: Kitiara, the Blue Lady, the conqueror of Solamnia.

  He could see her hand reaching for the Crown of Power. She had already, perhaps, removed one of her rivals …

  Ariakas did not fear Kit. He feared nothing and no one. If he had thought her daring plan was his only chance for victory, he would have ordered her to proceed and he would have dealt with her when she challenged him. But the more he considered her plan, the more he saw the potential for disaster.

  Ariakas mistrusted Kit’s reliance on dragons. Before the Dark Queen’s return, Ariakas had never brought dragons into battle, and while he admitted they had their uses for destruction and intimidation, he did not think it wise to rely on them to take the lead in a fight, as Kitiara was proposing. Dragons were arrogant beasts. Powerful and intelligent, they considered themselves as far above humans as humans considered themselves above fleas. Ariakas could not, for example, give a dragon a direct order. The dragons were obedient only to Queen Takhisis, and even the goddess had to be diplomatic in her approach.

  Kitiara’s reckless and unorthodox plan went against all Ariakas’s notions of the proper way to conduct a war, and it wouldn’t hurt her to get smacked down for once—remind her who was in charge.

  “No,” he said decisively. “We will strengthen our hold on the south and the east and then we will march on the High Clerist’s Tower.” He emphasized the word. “As to the Solamnic knights, I have my own plan for their destruction.”

  Kitiara was disappointed. “My lord, if I could just explain the details, I’m sure you would come to see—”

  Ariakas slammed the flat of his hand down on the desk. “Do not push your luck, Blue Lady,” he said grimly.

  Kitiara knew when to quit. She knew him and understood him. She knew he distrusted dragons. She knew he distrusted her and that his distrust was part of his decision, though he would never admit it. It would be dangerous to continue to press him.

  Kitiara also knew, with a certainty bordering on the uncanny, that he had just made a serious mistake. Men would pay for that mistake with their lives.