Becoming the Dragon

Part 3: Fire of the Soul, part 5

The wagon wobbled from side to side. The cage wobbled, and with it, the whole world. The alarm ringing in his head resounded with the sound of the wheels on the pavement. His whole back, from his rear end to his neck, stung sharply. His legs were limp. Biting his lips from the pain, sometimes until they bled, Andy wondered why they hadn't beat him to death like they had that orc. His hands were so numb he could not feel them at all, perhaps because he had been hanging by them. After the flogging, they hadn't put him back in his "home" cage. He was in a separate one, his hands already fitted with metal bracelets with a new chain. His legs were held by special constraints, bolted to the floor, with chains pulling outward to each side and upward into an "X". It was impossible to do anything in that position.

Andy didn't know how many lashes he had received. By the time he came to, the caravan had left the woods and was moving toward a castle on a rocky cliff that jutted out over a wide river. A winding road led up to the cliff, and then turned to the left. With their right side facing the castle walls, the caravan continued up to a small drawbridge across a wide moat. From inside one of the narrow arrow-slit openings of the right flanking tower, the pointed helmet of a soldier gleamed in the sunlight. Despite the searing pain from the cuts on his back, Andy curiously examined the stone walls. He had read a lot about the architecture of medieval castles but was seeing what appeared to be a real one for the first time.

The base of the walls was reinforced with powerful stone boulders about twenty feet high. Above that was masonry of red brick, with the total height of the walls no less than 35 feet. Thin arrow-slit openings for archers decorated the top, alternating every ten feet with flat openings for crossbows, wider at the edges. At the corners of the walls, flanking towers protruded. A deep moat, full of water, curved toward the road in an arc. Behind it, forward-thinking engineers and construction workers had installed a palisade and equipped it with stakes like a porcupine. The same palisade was in front of the moat, too. The road ended at a high tower over the gates, adorned with quite formidable tar spikes.

The caravan came to a halt across from the gates, and two horsemen rode out from it. The pair crossed the drawbridge, and the metal gate lifted for the exact time it took to cross under it before closing with a crash. Above the high parapet gallery, concealed by a wooden awning, the helmets of the castle garrison flashed.

Andy closed his eyes and tried to relax. It was all he could do. His mom used to go to yoga quite often and practiced autogenic training, so there was no shortage of literature — books and brochures — on these topics at home. He had periodically leafed through them — they were too tedious to read properly. Now, he recalled that information, and in 30 or 40 minutes, he'd begun to relax. Continuing with the methods described in the brochures, he estranged himself completely from the world around him and concentrated on his burning back. It was surprisingly easy; Andy noticed that he felt much more at ease in his new, simple iron cage. The old cage had drained him of his energy and pressed on him with an unrelenting doom.

Now, the sensations of the world faded, and the darkness around him changed to whole gushes of rainbow light. A whole ocean of energy roared like a tidal wave somewhere just beyond the borders of perception. With an overwhelming need, he reached toward that wave and felt a thin border pop. Energy crashed onto him, and acting on intuition, he divided it around the parts of his body, directing most of it to his wounded back.

The wagon jerked, pulling Andy from his trance. The pain in his back was gone, and he knew the wounds had been replaced with young, pink skin. He was ravenous and was prepared to scarf down even the slop that was offered to him and his fellow captives.

***

After an hour of waiting, the metal mechanisms in the tower began to screech, and the gates were lifted. The first cart in the caravan entered the fortress. The wagon containing Andy's cage ended up in a narrow stone courtyard before passing through a second set of gates, stopping in a little peninsula of high walls. They took the castle's defenses seriously, apparently. Under the awnings, there were large cauldrons. Piles of firewood lay around. Barrels of tar stood next to the cauldrons. Pyramids of boulders had been carefully stacked near the walls. Order and cleanliness reigned. Clearly, the commander of the garrison earned his keep.

Andy's wagon rolled into a wide courtyard. At the far end, stood an imposing dungeon tower. But something else caught Andy's attention. In the middle of the large square, between two tall pillars, stood a platform with ramps attached. A blue haze hung in the air between the pillars. Below that, a dozen people in white cloaks with eight-pointed stars on their backs milled about.

The first wagon went up onto the platform and disappeared, followed by a second, which met with the same fate as the first. Teleportation! Andy guessed. Soon, it was his own wagon's turn. The female driver gave the horses' crupper a jerk with the reins, and the wagon left the castle and suddenly appeared in a wide square surrounded by walls of white stone. Soldiers wearing chain-mail and armed with crossbows walked along the pedestrian walkway. Andy turned his neck to look the other way, as much as was possible in his state. Behind his back loomed a tall arc, illuminated with a bluish haze.

"Raston!" the driver said happily and spurred the horses.

They followed a wide cobblestone road leading down the small hilltop from the fortress they had just entered towards a large city surrounded by fortified white walls. Winding streets could be seen behind the walls with the spires of churches or other buildings above them. Andy guessed they were temples. Clay roof tiles adorned the tops of the three- or four-story buildings, forming a carpet of red. Hundreds of little villas stood out like a green patchwork quilt.

The city extended from the edge of a large lake or a small sea on which a multitude of sailboats scurried about. Long piers covered by stockades wedged their way onto the water's surface. Traveling along a road lined with trim, pyramidal trees, the caravan turned at a wide fork toward the grandiose castle visible at the edge of the city.

The new walls did not impress Andy as much as the first fortress on the rocky cliff. The caravan crew squawked at the soldiers on the wall and in the tower over the gates. The gates creaked and the carts moved forward in single file into the wide courtyard. A wiry man in a long black robe approached the head wagon and spoke with the head of the caravan guards and a young, vile-looking man with a medallion around his neck. Apparently, he gave them valuable directions, because the vile-looking man jumped down from his horse and went into the watch room. The wagon drivers drove the wagons and their prisoners along a path sprinkled with fine gravel toward some boxy construction visible behind the trees. The cages containing the animals remained in the square.

The structures turned out to be not all that boxy. Against the backdrop of the grand castle, the structures looked quite homely. The carts rode up to the barracks and stopped. The door of the first building opened, and no less than fifty warriors spilled out. Dressed in chain mail with mirrored breastplates, each one carried a spear similar to a Roman pilum, and sheaths with short swords hung from their belts.

The warriors formed two ranks before another couple dozen eager soldiers with enormous dogs on leashes joined them. They took the orcs from their cages one by one and chased them in the direction of the structures. The dogs chomped at the bit to get off their leashes, and a slave had only to pause or stumble for a moment to receive a strong blow with the shaft of a spear. One foolish orc contrived to push a warrior with a pilum and run off the other way. The dogs were released, and the runaway didn't get ten steps before he was knocked to the ground. Another four dogs joined the melee and tore the screaming orc to pieces in seconds. There were no more attempts to resist or disobey. The warriors grabbed the dead body with a hook and dragged it away somewhere behind a barn. They poured sand on the blood stains.

Andy was the last one to be removed from his cage. The blacksmith pounded on the rivets of the shackles for a long time to remove them; they had chained him soundly. A couple of men with mage's stars on their black camisole uniforms joined the warriors. One of them carefully examined Andy and said something to his peer, whose eyes opened wide. He joined him in the inspection. The mages spun Andy like a doll and clicked their tongues, periodically exchanging words.

Soon, the captain of the guard grew impatient with the improvised medical examination and shoved Andy in the direction of the second building, which had familiar looking grayish colored bars on the windows. About ten guards fell into formation around it. The mages walked behind them, still discussing the results of their examination.

A strong kick sent him into the small chamber, and the lock on the super-thick doors began to screech. The doors were upholstered with studded strips of gray metal. A pile of hay lay in one corner, a wooden pail with a cover in another. There was a tiny little window. That was all. Andy sat down on the hay. Mice began to squeak in protest from underneath him. He hugged his knees and began to ponder. The hunt is at hand... he surmised correctly.