*****
Movement. Borac was jostled awake.
“He’s alive!” someone whispered.
“Quiet!” a second man commanded. “Listen.”
The wound over his eye continued to pulse blood, but now the eye was bandaged with a strip of cloth. His other eye was closed. He recognized the smell of humans.
A moment later, another man moved near Borac’s right. “I hear nothing!” he said. There was the sound of sword scraping against shield, a rattle of armor, and shuffling dirt. “I’m going to try to find our company.”
“We’re not going anywhere!” the second man, perhaps the leader of these men, said. “A black dragon fell near here!”
The smell of human fear brought Borac closer to consciousness. He attempted to rouse himself further, unsure whether these men had penetrated his disguise, even clothed and in human form. They might be suspicious if they recognized the insignia on the uniform he had stolen. Borac clenched his teeth, letting himself feel the comfortable swell of add within his belly. It brought some measure of relief. If he needed, he could revert back to his dragon body and kill these men in an instant, even wounded as he was.
“That dragon’s around here, I tell you!” said the third man nervously. “I feel it. Can’t you?”
Borac kept his face slack and his eye closed. He could hear them shiver in their armor, and they stank of terror.
“I’m going,” the third man said. “The battle has turned! If we don’t escape now, we’ll never find our company!”
“What of the dragon? And this wounded man? We can’t leave him here.”
Borac waited for an answer.
“We’ll bring him along. You go ahead, scout the way,” the leader finally replied. “We’ll follow.”
Another sound of rattling armor, and the scout was gone over a ridge. Borac felt himself being shifted, his head propped up under something softer than the ground, probably a bedroll. “Let’s try to find a couple of spears and make a transport for this man. We’ll take him back to camp and pray to Mishakal her cleric can do something to save that eye.”
A cleric. A cleric of Mishakal. Borac almost laughed at the irony. He, the perfect assassin, a dragon, wounded, disguised as a human, and dropped at the feet of the man he had orders to kill.
He almost laughed, but when they lifted him, the pain overwhelmed him. He dropped back into darkness. …
*****
“. . . slaughtering everyone!” Borac heard. “The wounded and the living!”
Borac stirred from his darkness and slowly opened his good eye. The pain had subsided somewhat, though the memory of the dragonlance was like a fresh stab reopening the wound.
“We’ve rested long enough!” the leader said. Borac eyed his rescuers. It seemed all the men were cut from the same cloth, each about the same height, the same size. Their white uniforms were tattered and their armor damaged, links missing from chain mail and plates dented by mace-blows. They wore their helms and had their weapons ready.
The leader gestured toward Borac, then bent to Borac’s side. “It would have been easier on you if you had stayed asleep,” he said. “Are you up to being moved?”
Borac said nothing. His muzzy thoughts wove themselves into the realization that this man and the others were risking their lives to save him. If he had heard this tale in a bar, he would have laughed derisively. He didn’t feel like laughing now.
“Let’s go,” the leader commanded. They lifted Borac from the ground and carried him out of a small depression in the side of the hill where they’d been hiding. Two of six men pulled the transport made of a blanket and two spears, while the others surrounded him, weapons ready. There was a feeling in Borac’s heart like no other he had felt in his long years. These men were actually cooperating, working together to save what they thought was one of their own. He wondered if they played dice.
The soldier to Borac’s right suddenly toppled over, two arrows piercing his chest. The leader deflected a thrown spear with his shield. Before the first soldier dropped to the ground, a unit of fighters from the Dark Queen’s army charged down the side of the hill. Their battle cry cut the air and seemed to penetrate straight into Borac’s wound, making him wince.