“Do it, Gerard,” Shaella added softly. “The light will draw things to us that we don’t want to run into out here.”
Gerard tried several silent commands to make the light go away, but none of them seemed to work. Off, Dim, Dark, Darkness. It grew very quiet. The air was crackling with tension, as everything alive inside the reach of the magical glow, held its breath. The silence became deafening. No matter what command Gerard gave, the light would not extinguish. Finally, under the intense gaze of all those strange pairs of eyes, he did the only other thing he could think to do. Reluctantly, he pulled the ring off of his finger. A dozen hisses and sighs of relief emitted from the suddenly darkened jungle around them. Gerard made a short prayer to the goddess that the light would stay gone when he slipped the ring back on. He let out his own sigh of relief when it did.
What seemed like days, but was really only a few hours later, they came to a clearing in the trees. Gerard gasped in shock when he saw a bowl-shaped depression, lit like a field full of burning stars by hundreds upon hundreds of campfires. Illuminated in the wavering orange glow around them, were thousands of Skeeks and other strange swamp creatures. A few big four-legged lizards could be seen carrying small groups of their two-legged kin around a perimeter of bigger bonfires. A dactyl bird, like they had seen soaring out over the marshes, was sharpening its long beak on a chunk of the black porous rock that was scattered about the clearing. It looked to Gerard as if all of the creatures there were, in one way or another, preparing for battle.
“An army of Skeeks?” he asked Shaella quietly.
One of the lizard men escorting them hissed out sharply.
“This is only one of several armies. And don’t call them Skeeks.”
She sheathed her sword and took his hand. “They prefer to be called Zardmen or ‘The Zard’. Come now, let’s feast, and then we can work out a plan to steal the dragon’s egg that pleases all of us.”
Gerard couldn’t help but wonder what they would be eating, and just who “all of us” really was.
Chapter 25
After being out in the cool, crisp mountain air for the past few days, the Elders’ council chambers seemed stiflingly hot. Every single pore on Hyden’s body was running freely with perspiration. His condition wasn’t caused solely by the temperature though. He was nervous, and more than a little bit afraid. He wanted to leave, but that wasn’t a possibility. The Elders would deny his exit, and probably lock him in a goat burrow if he so much as complained.
Talon was miserable too. He had fluttered over to the tip of one of the dragon skull horns that curved up out of the dancing blue flames, and perched there, but only for a heartbeat or two. Apparently, it was just as hot up there. The hawkling finally flapped his way down to the floor, and found a place between Hyden’s boots.
The stool Hyden was sitting on was directly in front of the dragon skull and facing it. The wicked blaze burning in the skull’s brain cavity made the dragon’s eye sockets seem alive, and made the semi-circle of Elders gathered around it look like a bunch of hungry ghouls.
Halden, the Eldest, sat directly across the sapphire blaze opposite Hyden. The dragon skull’s curved horns framed a disturbing picture, with Hyden’s grandfather at its center. The old man was chanting now, and raising his arms in a series of lunatic gestures. At precise intervals in the Eldest’s manic song, the rest of the Elders spoke the powerful words of invocation in unison. They shouted, in short bursts, phrases that seemed to make the walls of the cavernous burrow they were in hum with reverberation. Slowly, it became repetitive and hypnotic, and Hyden found himself slightly swaying to the flowing rhythm they had created. How long this went on, he couldn’t say. He had become lost in the moment.
Eventually, the walls of the chamber faded. All around and above them, was nothing but a deep empty blackness. Hyden looked up into it. A pinpoint of light appeared, then another, and then several more.
Suddenly, Hyden was looking at the open night sky. It looked exactly the same as it would have if they were outside around a campfire in the very same place. Or did it? Hyden questioned. Hadn’t the real sky been gray and cloudy?