The Dragon Lord Page 4

  Dewan guessed the sorcerer was asserting his mastery over the summoning. Or at least he was trying, for by the tremor in his voice he was still uncertain of success. Staring up at the huge, graceful being, ar Korentin wondered apprehensively what its response would be and even, in a secret corner of his mind, whether an adverse reaction would hurt.

  What punched between the bones of his left forearm didn’t hurt for the first couple of seconds after it struck home, but then the stunning shock of impact faded away, replaced by a searing pain like the touch of a hot iron. Dewan’s blood felt just as hot as it washed over spell-chilled skin, and though he had been wounded many, many times before, he still felt sick.

  “They didn’t carry bows…” There was more offended outrage than anything else in his protest to an uncaring world. Then he looked down at the small steel dart transfixing his arm and realised he had been both right and stupid. Even though none of the troopers had a bowcase amongst his gear, they were Alban horse-soldiers with telek spring-guns holstered on either side of the high pommels, as much a part of military saddle-furniture as girths and stirrups. It was so obvious that only being a foreigner preoccupied with other matters excused the oversight, though Dewan’s disgusted oath didn’t excuse himself at all. Even before his gaze shifted from the missile to its point of origin, he was sure of who had shot him. There was only one candidate.

  Erdal Astamon was up on one knee, and the click-clack of reloading carried clearly in the still, cold air. This time he gripped the weapon in both hands, and he was squinting along it with one eye while the other squeezed shut in a demonic wink of aim. The Warden’s youthful face wore a killing look as his telek steadied, unwavering now, and Dewan stared into its black bore for a time that seemed as long as the years of a man’s life. Time enough to live, and time enough to die.

  Time stops, he thought, and closed his eyes.

  *

  Gemmel hadn’t seen the shooting, but he heard the meaty slap of sharpened metal piercing flesh. In that same long time – less than half a second of reality –he turned and saw the levelled telek, Dewan’s wounded arm, and the blood flowing from it. The sorcerer saw all those things, and through them the older images which had haunted his dreams for years, inexorable events whose grim ending had taken away his son.

  He shouted a single short phrase and the power he feared was no longer his to command paid heed at last. The great white-armoured wedge of the icedrake’s head moved fractionally and its jaws yawned wide, a frigid blue-white cavern lined with ragged icicles. When it unleashed a blast of unimaginable cold, a seagull rash enough to fly too close tumbled from the air and shattered like blown glass when it struck the beach.

  King Rynert’s cavalry went down like wheat before a new-honed scythe, men and horses together in one heap. There wasn’t even a clatter from their gear, for by the time they hit the ground everything was sheathed and muted by an inch-thick crust of snow. Nothing escaped…

  Except for the slender object which flashed clear of the freezing haze. It had been only a lead-weighted dart when it launched from the young Warden’s telek. Now, blunted and thickened by accumulated ice, it was more like a lead slug hurled from a sling and when it hit Dewan ar Korentin right above his heart it sounded like one. He made a small noise halfway between a cough and a grunt, and his mouth opened as he tried to recover the air knocked out of him. Then he dropped to his knees and toppled backwards like a felled tree.

  For several seconds Gemmel saw nothing amiss. He was too concerned with other matters, and making sure the soldiers he had put down stayed that way was the least of them. There was also the icedrake, summoned without intent, unrestrained by wards or defences, with no means of enforcing its dismissal.

  And then he had no need. Without any further word or sign from him it was already fading. The scaled body, all icefloe blue and snowdrift white, grew swiftly transparent until it was barely an outline traced on the air with the delicacy of frost-ferns on glass. And then it was gone, leaving the sky above his head empty once more, slowly warming yet as clean and clear as polished crystal. Only the soldiers and their mounts, moving like sleepers in the grip of dreams, were proof it had been there at all.

  Gemmel spared them just the briefest glance. All his attention was for Dewan, sprawled face-upwards with his spine bent at an awkward angle by the bundle strapped to his back. Blood ran from the hole in his arm and another ribbon of it crawled from the corner of his mouth, dripping onto the sand behind his head. When Gemmel ripped open his tunic there was only a purple bruise, white-centred like some strange flower, to show where the second telek dart had driven home. But it had still hit like a hammer right above the heart, and there was a bluish tinge about the Vreijek’s slack lips. Though ar Korentin was a fit, strong man in the prime of his life, Gemmel was well aware what such a blow in such a place could do. He knew how to do it himself. Even as the thought took shape he was fumbling for a pulse with hands made clumsy and insensitive by the bone-deep cold he had created, and found an irregular fluttering like something caught in a trap. It faltered once, resumed, faltered again…

  And stopped.

  “No.” Gemmel didn’t shout the word as a frantic denial; he said it as an unquestioned fact. A blow like the one Dewan had suffered could indeed stop a man’s heart and another, delivered with precision by a clenched fist, might start it again. Perhaps. Or a rhythmic pumping of both hands against the breastbone might encourage the heart beneath to match their effort. He did neither. His knuckles went pale as his grip tightened around the Dragonwand, but he had learned during the past few minutes that he could no longer trust the talisman to do his bidding. For now its powers had passed beyond his control. Instead he stared along the beach to where Warden Astamon was proving his youth and strength by fighting against the icedrake’s chill.

  He was the only one of his entire troop to move with any purpose, and that purpose was completion of his task. Not arrest of fugitives, not even reprisal for being attacked, but vengeance for the insult offered by the form of that attack. An attempt to kill him would have recognized him as a noble, honourable opponent. Instead the assault was by something closer to a barrage of snowballs flung at an irritating child. The young man had already rolled over and forced himself up onto his knees. Now he scrabbled for the fallen telek.

  “No,” said Gemmel again. With his right hand still pressed against Dewan’s unmoving chest he levelled the left at Erdal Astamon, its thumb, index and little fingers extended like the tines of a trident, and though he spoke the words of a healing-charm they came out as a curse. A lance of energy stabbed out at the Warden, shimmering like the haze which dances above a forge, and Astamon lurched backwards as if kicked.

  Gemmel had once told Aldric how magic needed energy to fuel it. That could come from a talisman like the Dragonwand, or be leached from other sources. It had taken the strength from three fresh-hewn oak logs to leave Aldric’s broken ribs as good as new, and the wood had decayed in that process from green timber to rotted pulp. There were no trees on this beach, and Gemmel was angry enough that he wouldn’t have used them anyway. Not with Warden Astamon so close at hand.

  The young man’s hair had been dark despite its crust of frost. As the haze surrounded him that hair faded to steel-grey and the skin of his ruddy face turned pale and collapsed into wrinkles, while his shoulders sagged beneath the weight of many years arriving all at once. That shimmer surrounded Dewan as well, and though his own grizzled hair and harsh features remained unchanged, the dart-wound in his arm closed until it was just a scar, pale and long-healed like the others he carried. Then his ribcage expanded with a convulsive jerk as his lungs wrenched in a whooping gasp of air.

  Gemmel felt the movement under his hand, and the thumps of a renewed heartbeat pounding almost loud enough to hear. He sat back on his heels and watched the regular rise and fall of Dewan’s chest while his own pulse slowed and the sweat of effort dried on his skin. A mirthless smile tugged at the corners of his mouth.
Five minutes more and what he had just done would have been necromancy.

  “I think that makes us even,” he muttered, and stood up to ease the kinks from his spine and cast a wary glance at the other bodies littering the beach. Then he put them out of mind. It would be a quarter hour or more before they could even stand unaided, and Erdal Astamon would walk with a cane for what few years of his life the brutal spell had left him. Gemmel remembered Aldric’s shock at the cost of careless healing-magic, and wondered how he would have responded now. He slid the Dragonwand awkwardly through the back of his belt and twisted it into something like security, reminding himself for the hundredth time to make it some kind of shoulder-strap. Then he crouched again and lifted ar Korentin from the ground.

  There was no visible effort, only a surge of strength that seemed more than human. He cradled the big man’s limp body in both arms as he might a child, as he had once carried his own child, as he had once carried the young Alban warlord who was now his fosterling. His own, most honourable son.

  Gemmel laid Dewan athwart the stern of the boat then raised the sail, steadied the tiller and spoke the words that summoned up an offshore breeze. Though he was drained and wearied by fear and physical effort and mental strain, he did everything in the same abstracted manner with his thoughts elsewhere. Those thoughts were out there, across and beyond forty miles of grey water, a distance too far for even a suggestion of the Empire’s coast to shadow the horizon. All his thoughts, his hopes, his fears both real and imagined. Out in that far place with the son not born his son.

  And he wondered if his son was safe.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Outside was dark and cold, an autumn night already edged with the oncoming winter. A scimitar moon cut fitfully through weak places in the overlay of rain-swollen clouds.

  Inside the small anonymous tavern it was almost as dark, but much warmer. Flame-lapped logs burned in a wrought- iron hearth, sparks glowed and spat, a sharp tang of resin scented the smoky air and nimble shadows danced among the rafters. From one corner of the common-room came the sound of a three-stringed fola playing a melancholy tune, each sequence of protracted chords as cruel as loss.

  The few patrons sat around plain wooden tables and drank from plain pottery cups, convinced they displayed the elegant austerity just now fashionable in the Drusalan Empire, even though several looked back and the rest forward to better days where luxurious excess was or would again be more socially acceptable. A false carefree tone overlaid their quiet conversation, which made the unease beneath it all the more apparent. The source of that unease was easy to find.

  He sat alone with his thoughts and a cup of cheap grapefire spirit made from the lees of wine, staring into the clear liquid as if it held the secrets of infinity rather than an oblivion he had sought since sundown. Wearing black and looking as if he did so for deeper reasons than stylish severity, his appearance would have deterred far friendlier people than the sullen few who sipped and murmured well away from him. He needed a shave, the pallor of his face threw a five-day stubble and the bruise-dark shadows under his eyes into sharp relief, and a coyac – a sleeveless jerkin of dense dark fur – hunched his shoulders to the point of deformity. It made him seem not entirely human.

  Empty jugs strewn across his table showed how long and hard he had been drinking, and by rights he should have been on the floor an hour ago. Instead the quick, economic movements which filled and refilled his cup were still sure and precise, and his grey-green eyes remained clear. That too was not entirely human.

  A sheathed longsword lay on the table amid the clutter, its hilt within easy reach and its unsubtle presence a blatant threat to peace. The innkeeper, trying to take the weapon from him after he drained the first two jugs far too quickly, had been warned off with a grotesque mixture of stilted formal Drusalan and gutter Jouvaine in an accent that had nothing to do with either. A great deal of silver changed hands almost at once, as if the stranger repented his hard words, and since he had plenty of the Empire’s florins and spent them as if they had no value, it seemed safe to let him drink himself into the stupor that was clearly his intention.

  Yet any stupor seemed as far away as ever.

  *

  Aldric Talvalin poured more grapefire into his cup and gulped down half of it with the wrenching swallow of someone taking a dose of medicine. The coarse stuff burned, making his nostrils flare and his eyes squeeze shut. The tears on their lashes weren’t mere maudlin drunkenness. Maybe tonight, if he drank enough, there would be no dreams.

  Dreams. Memories. And within those dreams and memories, nightmares. Fear, and fire, and candle-light. Again they came, rising through the haze of alcohol. It was an ill thing to jolt awake in the dark stillness of deep night, soaked with sweat and pinioned by the quilts with the echoes of your own cry of terror in your ears.

  But it was far worse to be awake already and jolt stone-cold sober.

  Aldric sat as he had sat before, trembling, while the drink which should have laid him gratefully senseless on the floor became just acid heat in his gullet. And still the dreams returned to haunt him.

  Blood, and flame, and shrieking. Things that were, but are not: things that are, but should never be. Huge wings in a starlit sky. A tall tower stark against iron clouds, and a swirl of snow. Blue smoke streaming upwards, the incisive reek of heated metal and the sweet, heavy scent of roses.

  Aldric dreaded his dreams for they always seemed portents of evil, and bitter experience had proved the truth of that foreboding time and again. His left hand reached out to a crumpled thing on the table near Widowmaker’s scabbard and it shifted as his fingers touched it, making a small, sere crackle. Once more he could smell roses. He had plucked this blossom from between the withered talons of an ancient corpse three months ago, standing at the heart of a burial mound in the Deepwood of the Jevaiden plateau. Now the rose was as withered, dry and dead, its baleful brilliance faded to a more natural hue and the unwholesome richness of its perfume diluted by time to a fragrance almost pleasant…

  Even though it was dead, he thought as he cradled the desiccated flower in the palm of his hand. Or because it was dead?

  As dead as Crisen Geruath.

  As dead as his own honour.

  He had already sent a note to Rynert the King – a terse, enciphered message of success at Seghar, delivered by the master of an Elherran merchantman – but his task remained incomplete. There were other messages, locked by sorcery within his skull. They were proofs of Alban support for Lord General Goth and Prokrator Bruda, and confidences which might sway overlords whose fealty still wavered between them and the Grand Warlord Etzel. If things had gone otherwise, Geruath of Seghar would have made meeting those men easy. Now his part in the deaths of Geruath and his son made such meetings an elaborate form of suicide. Aldric had few illusions about Imperial judicial process. Probably he was already tried and sentenced, with execution of the verdict delayed only because no-one knew where he had gone.

  Aldric had reached his decision after Seghar. The brutalities and the casual wickedness in that rotting heap of masonry had sickened him until he no longer cared about his own tenuous hold on the lands and lordship of Dunrath. His note to Rynert said as much, and he was getting out of the Empire while he still could. He should have been aboard the Elherran ship bearing that note, and indeed he would have been if an early morning canter hadn’t led him to the ridge towering high above Kenbane Haven. It was the only place along several miles of coast where he could see the bay beyond the harbour wall.

  A bay where an Imperial battleram was sliding though the dawn mist like a patrolling shark.

  Kenbane had been one of five points of departure agreed in secret with Rynert and Dewan ar Korentin. Now he wondered who else knew that supposed secret, for the warship’s presence was no accident. Even if it was, Aldric no longer cared. The threat was enough.

  That had been over two months ago, near a Vreijek port many miles south-west of here. Time and the onset of aut
umn gales must have made even the Imperial fleet if not exactly careless, then at least a little less enthusiastic. He would see when he tried to leave tomorrow.

  What profit in an enterprise, Lord King, Aldric rehearsed silently for perhaps the hundredth time, when I’ve already lost all chance of completing it?

  Rynert would have a hundred valid answers to that rhetorical question. Or the single answer which was all a king required.

  *

  A young man entered the tavern.

  He attracted no attention, though if anyone noticed him at all they might have wondered about the pains he took to avoid that attention; nondescript to a studied degree, dusty, tired, with an air of boredom that accompanied repetitive, unrewarding work. The gaze that swept the common-room had more sleepiness in it than anything else – until it reached Aldric, and the weary half-yawn carving notches in the corners of his mouth stretched much further as it became a wide grin of self-congratulation. The grin didn’t go unnoticed, by Kamis the innkeeper at least, for he sidled up to wonder in the way of innkeepers what had caused such obvious happiness, and did it mean celebration and more drinks?

  “I think,” said the young man, “I may have come into money.” He savoured the fine vintage Seurandec he had felt justified in ordering and nodded towards the drunkard in black. “That one isn’t local, is he?”

  “Him, local?” No more than you, Kamis almost said aloud, but after what this new arrival had spent on a single bottle of imported wine, he thought better of it. There was something about the idly asked question which struck him as peculiar. Nothing he could pin down, but it was there all the same. “Not by a long ride in any direction.”

  “I thought not. But you must have travellers from the seaport here to drink, eh?”