"You felt the awe?"

The lad nodded mutely, remembering the way his guts had seemed to liquefy in his belly at the sight of the monster, hating the tears that welled in his eyes with the memory. Fortunately Kelryn seemed to take his emotions as nothing more than the normal reaction in one who had encountered such an awe-inspiring beast.

"I suspect you saw the red dragon known as Flayze," the bandit lord declared. "He is the bane of these mountains, a bully and predator against elf, dwarf, and man. Wicked to the core, he relishes nothing so much as the slow death of one of his enemies, unless it is gorging himself on a haunch of charred meat."

"You know him?" Danyal was amazed to hear the man speak of the serpent with such familiarity.

"Indeed. He has something that I cherish, that I want very much. Yet even more, I have had cause to hate him for many long years."

"What does he have?" asked the youth, only to recoil as Kelryn's eyes went blank and his face lost every hint of emotion.

Any thoughts of obtaining further information about that history were blocked by the forbidding expression on Kelryn's face.

"Always wake me up for a dragon!" Foryth insisted once more, as if distressed that the conversation had proceeded so far without him.

"Why?" snapped the lad peevishly. "Would you try to kill it?"

"Of course not!" Foryth was horrified. "Why, such an act would completely shatter any historian's pretense of neutrality! It's hard to think of anything that could be more disruptive of the proper observer's role."

"Not to mention that killing a dragon is far from an easy thing to do," Kelryn noted. Once again his tone was light, and in spite of himself, Danyal felt a flash of relief that the bandit lord's aloof mood had passed so quickly.

"How can a dragon be slain?" asked the youth. He had a vague memory of his intentions when he had started up the valley from Waterton. From the vantage of a few days' distance, his goal of killing the monstrous serpent seemed laughably unattainable, not to mention suicidal.

"The best way has always been to get a bigger, stronger dragon to do it for you," Kelryn said with a bitter laugh. "It's how the Dark Queen was defeated during the last war."

"But this dragon wasn't killed."

"No." The bandit lord shook his head seriously, considering his reply. "If you live long enough, you will find that many dragons, wyrms of all the clans of metal and color, still dwell in many of the hidden corners of Ansa-lon."

"Why don't they rule the world, then?" Danyal couldn't think of any way that a serpent such as Flayze could be stopped, if the monster took it into his head to claim any kind of realm for himself.

"That's a good question. What does our historian have to say on the matter?"

Foryth scowled, tsking a few times as he pondered the subject. "The best reason seems to be that they don't want to," he said finally. "Gilean knows that any one of them could wreak a great deal of havoc if it decided to do so. But they fight among themselves all the time-at least, all the time when they're not sleeping. And a big dragon sleeps a lot, sometimes for ten or twenty years at a stretch. Each dragon is more concerned with its own comfort than with other matters."

"Don't the Knights of Solamnia hold them in check, sort of?" Dan asked. Remembering the gleaming armor, the brawny size, and easy, capable grace of the few such armored horsemen that he had seen, the lad tried to picture a human fighter competing with the massive killing force of a red dragon. Even that picture was scary, as Danyal was forced to conclude that the would-be drag-onslayer would truly be facing a hopeless task.

Both Kelryn and Foryth were shaking their heads.

"Bah!" the bandit lord said with a curse. "The knights are old women now, weaklings who are afraid of their own shadows. There are none of the bold lancers left from the days of the war."

"That is open to debate," the historian disputed. "But you should know, lad, that the tales of a knight on horseback killing a dragon, no matter how courageous he is, how pure his heart and steady his hand, are merely the stuff of legend and fiction. No, a mighty dragon has very little to fear from anything except another mighty dragon."

"But there has to be some way!" insisted Danyal, so intently that both men turned to regard him with interest. "I mean, it's hard to believe all those stories, all the legends of dragonslayers and heroes and stuff, were just made up," he concluded lamely.

"Remember the old saying: "Never underestimate the imagination, nor the thirst, of a bard,' " Foryth noted with a benign chuckle. "Most of those tales you're recalling were invented by a traveling minstrel who needed a good tale in order to sing himself a supper and a pitcher or two of fine ale. Such poets and artists should not be confused with the true student of history-that is, the dispassionate historian."

"Ssst!"

The warning came from the darkness ahead. Danyal stiffened, watching the hunched figure of Zack slip off the road. The other men of the band, too, shrank into the shadows.

Then he heard whistling, melodic notes rising through the night air.

And he knew that the bandits had found another victim.

circa 374 AC

Fistandantilus heard the pulse through the ears of his host, and it was closer than it had ever been before. Blood quickened in the incorporeal stuff of his mind, and renewed hunger tingled in his tongue, tantalized his memories.

The bloodstone!

Fistandantilus lusted for the touch of that potent artifact, knew that its arcane force would allow him to master-and then destroy-this wretched kender. The wizard's essence churned with vigor as he tried-as he had tried for so many decades-to make his power felt.

And for the first time in the foggy expanse of his entrapment, he was close to succeeding. At last the bloodstone and his kender host were nearing each other, approaching the connection that would open the way to his freedom and his revenge!

For a moment, the spirit basked in anticipation of tormented victims, of the blood and the souls and the lives that would be his for the feasting. He was determined that there would be killing enough to satiate the hunger nurtured in this unthinkably long imprisonment.

But then another power intruded into his arcane awareness. This was a force that disturbed the true linkage between the essence of the wizard and his ancient bloodstone! It was a mysterious presence, a film of gauze that shrouded his control, masked his power, yet at the same time it was a force magical, spiritual, and ghostly. And it fought for the bloodstone with the same vigor and the same sense of proprietary ownership that drove the wizard's own hungry essence.

He sensed vaguely that this intrusive power was centered near the person of a human, and it was competing with Fistandantilus, powerful enough to block the arch-mage's best hope of success.

Seething, hateful of this new complication, the wizard sensed that the bloodstone was getting closer still. He heard the pulse as a loud cadence, thumping through his very self.

It was really, truly near! Now the talisman reached out to him with tendrils of glorious heat, close enough to be almost within his reach. Tingles of power and awareness shivered through the archmage's ethereal being. The cadence of life that had once been a distant suggestion was now a thunderous drumbeat resonating constantly, driving him with insatiable hunger and need.

But it was a bitter fact that the bloodstone was actually within the reach only of the pathetically directionless kender, the person who had been an unwilling and unwitting host to the spiritual essence of Fistandantilus for more than a century.