The Dragon Lord Read online

  “It is as well for you, hlensyarl,” said Aralten, “that I must obey my orders. Otherwise I would take pleasure in supervising a worthy punishment for this. Oh, I would…” He explained at length, in elaborate detail while Aldric hung in the man’s grasp as limp and unconcerned as a kitten in its mother’s mouth, gazing at him and through him as if he wasn’t there. He had listened to such recitations before, whether proof of an original and nasty mind or mere unimaginative brutality. But thanks to Aralten’s so-important orders, these were just onion-scented bluster and a random fleck of spit.

  Only two words counted in Aldric’s mind right now, words which had nothing to do with Drusalan naval officers and their futile threats. They were words he understood in the literal sense, but didn’t dare to recognise as a title. Not yet. These were words which with a second more to ask he would have echoed in a question. Dragon Lord? What do you mean? Once the hautmarin ran out of breath and invention, he smiled full in the officer’s face.

  “Despite all you say, shipmaster,” Aldric used the civilian title for a deliberate insult, “all you can do is write about this incident in your report. Yes?”

  “No. Not quite.” Aralten smirked nastily. “I can do much more than that, hlensyarl. Bring him below.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  “That’s the house,” said Dewan. He didn’t stop, didn’t slacken his pace, didn’t point, but his certainty was reassuring. He had gained his information without threats or bribery, from people unaware they were answering questions, and that, he said, meant it was as true as honest error could be.

  Gemmel glanced at the building and was impressed. He was also embarrassed, for after hearing the woman they sought was a courtesan, his mind had replaced the word with all its uglier alternatives. That response was unusual for a tolerant man, yet once formed it led to further misconceptions and errors that shattered now like so much glass. None of the sluts or harlots or whores of his imaginings would live in such a graceful dwelling. Gemmel altered the angle of his stride a fraction, meaning to walk straight in since gentlemen callers would be a familiar, unremarked sight here, but Dewan was suddenly in the way.

  “Not so hasty!” The Vreijek’s low voice was as crisp and commanding as it had been since they first passed through the Landwall Gate. Dewan could have put on the uniform and half-armour from his laden pack and not drawn a second glance by sound, gesture or conduct. “We need to do this carefully. Remember the battleram. If we’re guessing right, someone was here before us. I want to make sure they’re gone before we go barging in.” They walked on, with the air of men bored by their surroundings, until Dewan let out a small warning grunt. “Yes. There. In the alley by the stable. Don’t look! One man. Minding his own business. Perhaps too much.”

  The Vreijek’s stride and balance shifted as his hand went to his sword-hilt, two small movements which readied violence and sudden death from the prompting of a single glance. Then he took a second glance, the tension vanished and he even chuckled. The sound was so incongruous that Gemmel chanced an over-shoulder look at the source of such conflicting reactions and understood at once.

  “Ah,” he said, and stifled a laugh of his own. There was a paragraph of meaning in the single word. “Minding his own business indeed.”

  The man Dewan ar Korentin had seen in the alley, and might have killed had he not taken that swift second glance, staggered past them with a slurred mutter that in his present state passed for a greeting. He was fastening his breeches and smelt strongly, perhaps too strongly, of beer. That hint of deceptive excess was why Gemmel watched until the man was out of sight around a corner, and when he turned to Dewan it was as if his brief amusement had never existed.

  “Do we stay here, or do we get this matter done with and out of the way?”

  “Gemmel, I told you once so I’ll tell you again, don’t worry about it. You still talk as if I’ll put someone’s feet in the fire. I won’t.”

  “Unless you must. And then you will.”

  “Not if we can learn what we need in any other way. Remember, I served with the Bodyguard Cavalry, not with the Secret Police.” He grinned, pleasant for an instant, and with a minute shift of muscle stripped away the humour until only bared teeth remained. “But I can still talk a good threat.”

  *

  Kathur was packing clothes into a travel-trunk when she sensed a change in the light and saw the outlines of more intruders framed in her bedroom doorway.

  Two days ago she would have smiled at them, chided them for arriving without an appointment, then welcomed them with food, drinks, music and in due course herself, after generous payment for each stage of the entertainment.

  A day ago she would have stared at them in terror and even wept as she cringed into the corner of the room, hoping they weren’t sent to hurt her again in the cruel afterthought that gave Voord such vicious delight.

  Today she dropped the armful of silks and satins, ignoring how they burst from their careful folds across the trunk and bed and floor like so many colourful banners. Though she still backed away with fear bright in her eyes, now dead Stromin’s makher shortsword gleamed just as bright in her hand, wrenched from its scabbard at the small of her back.

  The foreign woman had helped her learn that, along with so much else. Unjudging, sympathetic and most of all in that vile aftermath, not a man, she had given Kathur what comfort and companionship she could spare. Part of it had been some brief, brutal lessons in how to use the makher so what Voord had done would never happen again without a fight. They wouldn’t defeat a skilled swordsman, she had warned, but any of the unexpected stabs and slashes could drop an unwary assailant in his tracks. ‘Then run,’ the woman had said, before giving Kathur a bleak smile. ‘But if you can spare the time, finish the bastard. And then run.’

  Kathur stared at the two men and almost hoped they were Voord’s creatures, so she could send him back a message inked in blood. Only the big broad-shouldered one with the moustache looked dangerous. The other was old; his hair and beard were white and he leaned on a walking-stave. If she moved suddenly enough she could…

  She could do nothing of the sort. If they attacked her, she would defend herself. Otherwise leaving Tuenafen alive and without further hurt would be enough to hope for. More than enough.

  Then the big one entered the room and Kathur realised she might not get even that.

  *

  “Dewan, stop!” said Gemmel, sharp as parade-ground drill, and ar Korentin halted in his tracks with a quizzical, eyebrow-lifted glance. “Can’t you see she’s frightened? Better if I talk to her. You’ve got too much of an Imperial air about you.”

  That got him an affronted grimace, and it wasn’t the only problem the wizard could see.

  Ar Korentin had coaxed Kathur the Vixen’s home and appearance from a local man, expecting mere fragments of information and a heavy overlay of disapproval. Maybe Gemmel’s own reaction had been more obvious than he thought. Instead the enthusiastic reply had no trace of disapproval in it. Any first-rank courtesan was a cultured if unattainable ornament to the neighbourhood, and her various gentlemen callers made lavish purchases of wines and flowers and sweetmeats from the local shops without ever, or hardly ever, questioning their prices. It wasn’t surprising, the man said, because she was so graceful, and so beautiful…

  But not today. Only her lustrous fox-red hair was unchanged. Cuts and bruises marred the face described with such wholehearted admiration, and the flinching, careful way she moved implied that her clothes hid much worse. To Gemmel’s private shame, the first words out of his mouth were an unjust suspicion based on hard-learned awareness that with the right wrong reasons, anyone could be cruel. Anyone at all.

  “Lady, did…” He hesitated for a second, unwilling to say any more, but he had seen his foster-son channel hatred into destruction with so much ease that the question needed asked and answered.

  “Did Aldric Talvalin do this to you?”

  *

  The battleram l
imped towards harbour as she had limped since her fiery encounter with Ymareth. Aldric, on deck and under guard, was limping too. Important prisoner or not, gentleman or not – both insisted on, both to no avail – he had helped the warship’s crew speed their voyage to port and those exertions hurt.

  He hadn’t known the wish-wind enchantment was woven directly into the fabric of the sails. He hadn’t known each battleram had only one suit of those augmented sails, and their destruction took away the battleram’s ability to move wherever her captain desired, regardless of the vagaries of wind and weather. And he hadn’t known, though he had suspected, that without those enchanted sails an Imperial capital ship became lumbering and ungainly. He knew it now, with the information docketed at the back of his mind for possible future use.

  And he also knew how such a vessel move through the water without even ordinary sails, though that education was one he had no wish to repeat. It thrummed through every fibre of his body from toes to scalp in an overture of aches like the strings of a mistuned coruth in the hands of a clumsy player.

  Hautmarin Aralten had explained everything with malicious satisfaction and an engineer’s relish while he and his escort marched Aldric down to the drive-chamber which ran half the length of the warship’s hull. The propulsion didn’t come from pulling oars. Teynaur, like the battlerams in Tuenafen Port, carried only half a dozen sweeps for close manoeuvring, too few and too short for protracted use on the high seas. Instead there was an arrangement of huge gears down near her keel, a mechanism of the sort a wind or water mill might power.

  But without wind or water below decks, the warship’s source of power was human effort.

  *

  “You should strip.”

  Aralten’s suggestion, with its hint of humiliation or worse, drew a glare from Aldric in the second before a final door opened in front of him. In the second afterwards he realised the advice was sound and even well-meant. Teynaur’s drive-chamber was low-ceilinged and dim-lit, it stank of greased machinery and human sweat, and it was as hot as a steam-bath. There were alcoves or cubicles along each side of the central walkway, and the man in each grasped a head-high rail as he trod up the cylindrical stairway beneath his feet. Each cylinder linked to the rumbling drive-shaft beneath the walkway, and that led in due course to the seven-bladed wheel which churned the water at the warship’s stern.

  “You’ll work in this one,” said the hautmarin. “Here’s your new relief, Nathran.” Aralten was evidently a commander who took pride in knowing all his crew by name. “Disengage and step clear.” The sailor on the treadmill shifted one hand from his support rail to a lever and pulled it sideways, then back. With the first pull there was a clank of disengaging gears like a bolt being thrown, and with the second his cylinder of stairs stopped moving.

  “For how long, captain?”

  “You’re free for two full shifts. Our guest will take the first; Radeg is on the second one as usual.”

  Resigned to the inevitable, Aldric had already slipped out of his clothes, right down to the short linen breeches under the arming-trews Kathur the Vixen had found so amusing. Despite being as near naked as any Alban cared to be without good reason, he was already sweating. As Nathran stepped clear of his cubicle Aldric got his first hint of how hard this work would be. A kailin’s training with sword and bow and horse meant he was already somewhat muscular, enough at least for compliments from Kyrin and Gueynor and Kathur, but alongside Nathran he was a sapling to an oak tree.

  The treadsman was about his height and age but was half again as wide, with broad shoulders, a massive chest and legs like treetrunks. He wasn’t a slave, there were none in the Empire’s ships, and a makher, a battleaxe and a shield was hanging alongside his cubicle. They didn’t stay there for long. After a quick glance at his captain Nathran grinned and, a little too ostentatiously, moved the weapons out of Aldric’s reach. Then with a derisive bow he invited the Alban to take his place on the locked treadmill.

  Aldric placed his feet on the treads, gripped the rail with one hand and pulled the clutch lever as he had watched Nathran do. The first pull let the treadmill turn and he began to climb its endless stair, but when the second pull re-engaged its gears he realised within two strides what had built the treadsman’s massive legs. He was no longer walking up but treading down against considerable resistance, and after only a dozen paces at this unaccustomed angle his thigh muscles began sending him unhappy messages that would only get more insistent.

  “A full shift is four hours, two turns of the glass, but you’re an Alban,” the real word was probably ‘weakling’ or worse, “so you’ll get a break halfway.” Aralten smiled maliciously. “That should give you time to think about what your dragon did to my ship’s sails.”

  “It’s not my dragon,” Aldric said, but the hautmarin was already walking away and he didn’t repeat himself. He suspected he would need all the breath he could spare.

  He was right.

  *

  That confusion of sweat and oil and nauseating motion would remain one of Aldric’s choicest nightmares for a long time. Working at the treadmill was like climbing up a fortress tower whose top got further away with every step. The constant clatter of machinery was irksome to ears familiar only with the noises of a sailing-ship, and always in the background was the ship’s own breath and heartbeat, the muffled hiss of water past the hull and that rhythmic whap-whap-whap of great rotating blades.

  When a sharp clang of bells announced his promised half-shift break, he wasn’t allowed off the cylinder. The only relief was to have its gears disengaged for a quarter-hour, but during that time it kept turning and he kept walking. As far as his brain could form coherent thought, Aldric supposed that was so his muscles didn’t cool. He had one advantage, a pair of rider’s legs accustomed to bracing round his horse’s barrel body for hours at a time. They didn’t cramp like those of someone who did nothing except walk on a level surface. Instead they cramped differently, pounding with pain from tendons and ligaments stretched in unfamiliar ways.

  But if Hautmarin Aralten had hoped to make him a limping laughing-stock the Drusalan officer was disappointed. He was even more disappointed next day when Aldric, driven by a surge of pride, obstinacy or sheer Talvalin bloody-minded stubbornness, worked both morning and afternoon shifts without the halfway break meant to coddle his hlensyarl weakness. Humiliation and punishment had no effect when they neither humiliated nor punished, and Aldric even started getting nods of approval from the regular treadsmen.

  On the third and final day before landfall, Aralten tried to regain a little prestige when he excused his guest from the drive-chamber, but he was disappointed once again.

  Aldric had already gone there by himself.

  *

  He stood now on Teynaur’s foredeck in the shadow of one of her weapon-turrets, as clean as several buckets of seawater could make him and back in his own clothes, watching while the battleram eased with a delicacy that approached art into a stone-walled holding bay little wider than the ship herself. Evening was approaching, so this vessel, and the five others in fortified docks or riding at anchor out in the estuary, were all showing lights. That scarcely described the level of illumination on the hulking armoured vessels, for in the twilight each floating fortress sparkled like a great house tricked out for a party.

  “Alban?” It was tau-kortagor Garet again, one of the several men aboard who had treated him with more friendliness since his unstinting efforts to help drive the ship. “You disembark here. Teynaur has to go into dry-dock for repair after—”

  “The visitor?”

  “That’s one word. I’ve heard others.” Garet’s helmet might have contained a grin. “You’re being talked about.”

  “What do they say?”

  “The polite version or the truth?”

  “If that’s the way of it,” this time it was Aldric’s turn to grin, stretched and false though it was, “forget I asked.” He hesitated, knowing he was presuming a t
enuous bond somewhere between acquaintance and vague friendship which most likely didn’t exist at all. “Where are we? And who had me brought here?” The questions seemed to make Garet uncomfortable. He turned his head away as if fascinated by non-events at the far end of the harbour, and Aldric could no longer see his face.

  “The first I’m not allowed to answer,” the young man said without looking back, “and as for the second,” he touched a finger to the solitary silver bar at his collar, “with this low rank I’m not allowed to know.”

  Aldric shrugged. It was the response he should have expected, and more courteously phrased than it might have been. With a nod and muttered word of thanks to the officer-cadet he squared his shoulders and walked to a boarding-ladder where the crew of the ship’s cutter were waiting to take him ashore. Beyond the quays and loading-cranes common on any waterfront lay a sprawling structure that had nothing to do with wharves or warehouses. It was a fortification, walled and turreted, gated and grim, and its courtyards were alive with well-drilled troops of horse and foot moving back to their barracks. Even to someone accustomed to such things it was an unnerving sight.

  Her ruined sails had meant Teynaur reached harbour almost four days later than expected. This was the first day of the tenth month and the first day of the start of winter, the evening sky was as grey as woodsmoke and despite the many lanterns shining like jewels along its massive walls, the crouched shape of the stronghold was ugly and ominous beneath that sombre canopy of cloud. Spired turrets reared a jagged array against the lowering heavens while the banners they bore, indecipherable in the dusk, flapped listlessly from their poles. There was no elegance in the place, not even the harsh grace born of pure functional design. This looked like what it was: a fortress, and a prison.

  Aldric stared out over the bows of the cutter, trying to imagine yet again who could send a battleram to bring him here. He fancied he would soon find out.