Servant of the Dragon Read online

  SERVANT OF THE DRAGON

  Lord of the Isles

  Book III

  David Drake

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Author's Note

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Dedication

  To Jamuna devi dasi, AKA Melissa Michael

  Who makes the world a better place

  Acknowledgments

  Dan Breen, my first reader, describes himself as a clerk. This is valid; but while I value the way he catches grammatical errors, I gain even greater benefit from his more general criticisms. Though I often disagree (though I most often disagree), he forces me to consider why I did the particular things that I did.

  My mean time between failure with computers is about six months. Losing three of them during the writing of this novel was pretty remarkable, though. My thanks to Mark L Van Name, Allyn Vogel, Ruben Fernandez, and Rich Creal whose help made a series of frustrating experiences nonetheless survivable.

  If there's an author photo on this book, it's probably the one John Coker took in 1986 (I'm grayer but I wear the same trouser size). John is not only a fine photographer, he's one of the nicest people you could ever hope to meet. I really appreciate his permission to use his picture.

  Things go wrong in publishing, just as they do in every other form of human endeavor. Stephanie Lane at Tor works hard to fix errors. This is no more common in publishing than it is anywhere else, so I feel very fortunate to work with her.

  I had a difficult time during the course of writing this book. (See the first paragraph above for a lot of the reason.) My friends and especially my wife Jo were unfailingly supportive. My sincere thanks to all of them.

  Author's Note

  The (common) religion of the Isles is based on Sumerian cult and ritual, but the magic itself comes from the Mediterranean and is mostly Egyptian in its original source. The voces mysticae which I've referred to as 'words of power' in the text represent the language of demiurges; that is, they are intended to have meaning to beings which can then translate human desires to the ultimate powers of the cosmos. I have copied them from real spell manuscripts of the classical period.

  I don't personally believe that the voces mysticae have power over events, but millions of intelligent, civilized people did believe that. I don't pronounce the voces mysticae aloud when I'm writing.

  Rather than invent literary sources for the background of Servant of the Dragon, I've used real ones. The actual quotes are from poems by Horace and Ovid; my translations are serviceable, but Horace in particular deserves better than anyone can give him in English.

  In addition there are passing references to Homer, Vergil, Hesiod, Athenaeus, and Plato. The fascinating thing about going to original sources is that it's the best way to learn not only what people distant in time thought but also how they went about thinking.

  And you know, when you've seen the differences between us and the ancestors of our western culture, it may make you--as it certainly has made me--a little more tolerant of the beliefs of different modern cultures. That wouldn't be a bad thing for the world.

  Dave Drake

  Chatham County, NC

  Prologue

  The deeps trembled, shaking a belfry which hadn't moved for a thousand years. Eels with glassy flesh and huge, staring eyes twisted, touched by fear of the power focused on the sunken island. Cold light pulsed across their slender bodies.

  A bell rang, sending its note over the sunken city. It had been cast from the bronze rams of warships captured by the first Duke of Yole. A tripod fish lifted its long pelvic fins from the bottom and swam off with stiff sweeps of its tail.

  Ammonites, the Great Ones of the Deep, swam slowly toward the sound. They had tentacles like cuttlefish and shells coiled like rams' horns. The largest of them were the size of a ship.

  The powers supporting the cosmos shifted, sending shudders through a city which nothing had touched for a millennium. The bell rang a furious tocsin over Yole.

  The island was rising.

  The Great Ones' tentacles waved like forests of serpents in time with words agitating the sea. In daylight their curled shells would shimmer with all the colors of the sun. Here the only light was the distant shimmer of a viperfish flashing in terror as it fled.

  The dead lay in the streets, sprawled as they had fallen. Over them were scattered roof tiles and the rubble of walls which collapsed as the city sank. Onrushing water had choked their screams, and their outstretched arms clutched for a salvation which had eluded them.

  The bodies had not decayed: these cold depths were as hostile to the minute agents of corruption as they were to humans. Some corpses had been savaged by great-fanged seawolves which had swept into the city on the crest of the engulfing wave; other victims had been pulled into the beaks of the Great Ones and there devoured. For the most part, though, the corpses were whole except where sluggish, long-legged crabs had picked at them.

  Tides of light touched the drowned buildings and gave them color. Faint tinges of blue brightened as the island rose. At last even the rooftiles regained their ruddy tinge.

  The Great Ones swam slowly upward, accompanying Yole its return. The movements of their tentacles that twisted the cosmos.

  The belfry of the Duke's palace, the highest edifice in Yole, broke surface. Water cascaded from stones darkened by the slime which crawled along the sea's deepest trenches.

  Moments later the Great Ones surfaced, their shells a shimmering iridescence in the dawnlight. They swam slowly outward so as not to be trapped by the rising land. The S-shaped pupils of their eyes stared unwinking at the circle of wizards who stood in the air above the rising city.

  Three of the wizards wore black robes with high-peaked cowls over their heads. Their faces and bare hands were blackened with a pigment of soot and tallow. Only their teeth showed white as they chanted words of power:

  “Lemos agrule euros . . .”

  Three wizards were in robes of bleached wool, white in shadow and a mixture of rose-pink and magenta where the low sun colored the fabric. They had smeared their skin with white lead so that their eyes were dark pits in the thastly pallor of their faces.

  “Ptolos xenos gaiea . . .” the wizards chanted.

  The earth rumbled. Torrents thundered from the doorways and windows of Yole, spilling in echoing gouts along the broad streets that led to the harbor. Corpses flopped and twisted in the foaming water. Each syllable could be heard over the chaos, though the words came from human throats.

  The wizards’ leader was black on his left side, white on the right. He chanted thw words of power which his fellows echoed, syllable by syllable. From the brazier standing before him, strands of black smoke and white smoke rose, interweaving but remaining discrete.

  "Kata pheinra thenai...."

  Facing the leader was a mummified figure whose head the wizards had unbandaged. The mummy's sere brown skin bore the pattern of tiny scales, and the dried lips were thin and reptilian. Its tongue, shrunken to a forked string, flickered as the figure chante
d. Words of power came from its dead throat.

  The belfry continued to shudder, but the bell's voice was lost in the greater cataclysm. Sea birds wheeled in the air, summoned from afar as the sea thundered away from the newly risen land.

  "Kata, cheiro, iofide...," chanted the wizards.

  The ghost of a pierced screen hung in the air beyond the wizards, a filigree of stone that wavered in and out of focus. The screen's reality was that of another time and place, but the incantation had drawn it part-way with the wizards.

  The soil of Yole touched the wizards' feet. The island gave a further convulsive shudder, then ceased to rise. Waves, shaken away by Yole's reappearance, returned to slap its shore in a fury that slowly beat itself quiescent.

  In the harbor the Great Ones floated. Their tentacles waved in a ghastly parody of a dance.

  Gulls and frigate birds dived and rose again in shrieking delight. Yole's rise had swept creatures of the deep to the surface faster than their bodies could respond to the changes in pressure. Birds carried away the ruptured carcases in their beaks.

  The six lesser wizards collapsed on the dripping cobblestones of a plaza, gasping in exhaustion from the weight of the spell they had executed. Their leader raised his arms high and shouted, "Theeto worshe acheleou!"

  Momentary silence smothered the world, stilling the waves and even the screams of the gulls. Sunlight winked on the armor of soldiers and the jewelry of ladies who had arrayed themselves in their finest, not knowing that they were dressing for their own deaths. A child's hand still clutched an ivory rattle; it too gleamed in the sun.

  The leading wizard remained standing. His mad peals of laughter rang across the dead city.

  The mummy stood also, motionless now and silent. Its sunken eyes were on the wizard, and its reptilian features were twisted into a mask of fury.

  Chapter One

  Prince Garric of Haft, Heir Presumptive of Valence III, King of the Isles--and already by any real measure the ruler of the kingdom--facced his Council of Advisors. Down the table from him were the chief nobles of the island of Ornifal; some of the most powerful men in all the Isles. They were waiting for him to make known his wishes on the point before the council.

  Garric's wishes were to be back home in Barca's Hamlet, the village on Haft where he'd been raised for all but the first days of his eighteen years. There he'd been Garric or-Reise, the innkeeper's son; a clever lad and a strong one, a boy you could trust to keep your sheep from getting into trouble even though he was likely to be reading a book while he watched them. Life was a lot simpler then, although it had seemed complicated enough at the time.

  "You can't go back, lad," whispered the ghost in Garric's mind: Carus, the last king of the united Isles, whom wizardry had drowned a thousand years before. "Even if duty didn't keep you here in Valles, Barca's Hamlet isn't really your home any more."

  "I appreciate the desirability of a united command, Waldron," Garric said wearily. He didn't need King Carus, his ancient ancestor, to explain that Garric had seen too much of the world already to fit back into the comfortable round of a peasant community. "Nonetheless I'm not willing at least at this point to make the fleet a division of the Royal Army."

  And thereby put the fleet under Lord Waldron, the commander of the Royal Army. Waldron was a tall man, well into his sixties, who wore his iron-gray hair cropped close to fit under a helmet. His lineage went back over a thousand years, and he could raise several hundred men-at-arms from his family estates in the north of Ornifal.

  In a world constituted the way Lord Waldron believed it should be, Waldron himself would be King of the Isles. Garric kept his face straight, but he managed a wry inward smile which the image of King Carus in his mind shared. That Waldron served him, Garric or-Reise, was proof as clear as anyone could ask that Garric belonged in the position he now held.

  However much Garric and Waldron both hated the fact.

  "The existing naval officers are completely untrustworthy," said Lord Attaper, "and the oarsmen aren't much better. They rebelled against King Valence and the few who survived will rebel against you too if they get the chance."

  Attaper was Waldron's junior by twenty years. Both men were nobles--all those in this room were noble, with the exception of Garric himself--but Attaper had inherited a title without wealth. He'd entered the Blood Eagles, the royal bodyguard, and had risen to their command by the time a cataclysm brought Garric to the throne in all but name. Attaper was loyal to the oath he'd sworn to King Valence; but he was an ambitious man, and a very hard one.

  "Let me expand the scheme of training pikemen who can also row the warships," he continued. The scheme was Garric's own. He'd copied the phalanx with which King Carus had won every battle he fought--except for the last one against wizardry and the sea. "You'll have an army you can count on and you'll be able to shift in a week or less to any island in the kingdom."

  "May I remind both of you gentlemen that soldiers have to be paid!" said Lord Tadai, now Royal Treasurer in place of a well-meaning incompetent who'd held the position under Valence. Tadai wiped his round face with a handkerchief embroidered with the arms of his house, the bor-Tadimans.

  The council meeting was a formal occasion which required court robes of thick brocade. Tadai was a heavy man, and all his enormous wealth couldn't keep him from sweating like a pig. "Armies are a luxury, and--"

  "A luxury!" Waldron exploded, rising from his seat. The old warrior's hand twitched in the direction of his sword.

  "Did a trained army seem such a luxury a month ago when you expected the Queen's forces to swarm down on Valles, Lord Tadai?" Attaper snapped, more controlled than Waldron but no less angry.

  They were all getting to their feet and shouting. Royhas bor-Bolliman, Garric's Chancellor and closest to being Garric's friend of the men present, snarled, "And speaking of money, Tadai, the honor of the kingdom is being tarnished by your failure to pay--"

  "Gentlemen," Garric said in a mild voice. He knew no one would listen to him, but his father had raised him to be polite.

  Carus nodded approvingly in his mind. Garric remembered--though the memories weren't his own--a score of arguments, some of them outright brawls taking place while Carus stood grimfaced and aloof, waiting to choose his time to intervene so that he wouldn't become part of what he wa trying to halt.

  Liane bos-Benliman, a dark-haired girl of Garric's age, sat beside Garric and a half-step back, making it clear that she had no right to speak during the deliberations. In this room she was acting as Garric's secretary. She met Garric's eye and smiled, but there was concern in her expression.

  Liane was the only living person present who wanted the things Garric wanted and no more: peace and unity for the Kingdom of the Isles, which wizardry hda shattered a thousand years before and which wizardry now threatened to crush to dust. In Garric's eyes Liane was the loveliest woman in the Isles, and a more neutral judge might have concurred.

  Liane knew that Garric had had less than an hour's sleep the night before--a spy had arrived from Sandrakkan with information about the Earl's intentions that couldn't wait--so she worried about him. In her lap was a notebook whose leaves were thin sheets of limewood, waxed on either side and bound with silk cords. She made notes with a blunt stylus, using a form of commercial shorthand. Liane's father, Benlo bor-Benliman, had been a wealthy merchant who travelled extensively.

  Benlo had been a wizard as well. That had cost him first his fortune, then his life; and in the end, he had lost his very soul. Liane had faced demons and her father's demonic will. She hadn't flinched from any of that, and Garric didn't expect she ever would flinch.

  "The money's there, you just won't release it as your duty demands!" Royhas cried, leaning over the table from his side. Tadai, leaning toward the chancellor with his face the color of his scarlet handkerchief, said, "If you're so set on finding jobs for all your relatives, Royhas, then I suggest you find the money for them as well!"

  Lord Sourous was complaini
ng that a friend--"A friend as close as my life, I'll have you know!"--hadn't gotten the post he rightly expected. Lord Pitre was demanding justice, by which he meant vengeance against those who had treated him as a fool and a toady in the last years of King Valence's unassisted reign....

  Garric's index finger touched the conference table. It was of burl walnut, polished to a glassy sheen that brought out the richly complex pattern of the grain. In Barca's Hamlet men shaped wood with an adze or a broad-axe. Garric had never seen a saw or a sawn plank until fate took him from his home. A table like this was fit for the Queen of Heaven and Her consort, not mortals like Garric or-Reise.

  "And besides that--" Royhas said.

  Garric slammed his fist down. The table, large enough to seat twelve and heavy in proportion, jumped on the stone floor.

  No one spoke for a moment. Waldron took his hand from his swordhilt and smiled faintly.

  Garric smiled back. He hadn't eaten since... well, he'd had an orange and a roll baked from wheat flour at dawn, with nothing since. Maybe that was why he felt queasy.

  "Gentlemen," he said, "I'm going to adjourn this meeting because I'm obviously not in condition to keep it under control."

  "I'm sorry, your highness, but--"

  "I didn't mean to--"

  "Of course, Garric, I'll--"

  "Well, really, Pr--"

  "Silence!" Garric bellowed. The conference room shutters were slatted to let in summer breezes while maintaining privacy from the eyes of folk wandering through the palace grounds. They rattled against their casements. Even Liane jumped, though she immediately grinned as well.

  "Gentlemen," Garric continued in the quiet tone he preferred. "We'll resume this meeting tomorrow in the third hour of the afternoon. I know that some of you have written proposals. Leave them with Liane and I'll review them before that time."

  Garric's eyes flicked from Royhas to Tadai. Both men had their mouths open to speak. They saw Garric's expression, as grim and certain as a swordedge.