Servant of the Dragon Read online

  Age had ruined the building's interior. A few scraps of tapestry--mostly the metal strands which had been part of the weave--clung to the hooks beneath the cornice moldings, but for the most part the rotted hangings clogged the floors as dust. The furniture had fallen apart as well. Statues and urns set into wall niches remained, though some had toppled in the ages since they were brought here.

  No one had walked in the palace for decades, perhaps centuries. Garric felt the debris cling to his bare feet. He and Carus both were leaving footprints. The king followed the line of Garric's eyes; he nodded.

  They climbed the stairs by which servants had led Carus to Ansalem in past times. Had that been in the past? Though surely as many years had passed in this place as they had in the Isles.

  The king laughed suddenly. "It doesn't seem dangerous in the least, does it?" he said. "So why do I feel this way?"

  Garric shrugged. A right turn of the stairs followed a left turn, so that each man alternately had to lengthen his stride at the landings.

  "A hen's got a pretty good life too," he said. "Nothing to do but come to the kitchen door where the wife scatters grain in the morning, and then grub for herself the rest of the day. Then one morning the wife wrings the hen's neck and she's that day's dinner."

  Garric exchanged glances with Carus. "Not that we know whoever's bringing me here is planning dinner," he added. "But there isn't a lot I can do about it if he is."

  Carus laughed again. "We'll see what we can do," he said.

  Garric noticed the king's fingers twitched his sword up a finger's breadth to make sure it was loose in the scabbard. It was an unintended gesture; neither of them consciously thought that weapons would be of any use against the force controlling them. But it also showed that to Carus, the danger was theirs together and not Garric's alone.

  Garric gripped the king's shoulder and squeezed it. Both men smiled, though neither spoke.

  There was no one in the anteroom at the top of the stairs. The door that the tall man had guarded was barred from their side. Carus slid back the untarnished electrum bolt without difficulty, pulled the door open, and bowed Garric in ahead of him ironically.

  Ansalem was sitting on the stone couch again, apparently oblivious of the double-headed serpent, the amphisbaena, which shimmered in and out of view through him. He looked up eagerly, then frowned when he saw Garric and Carus entering the room.

  "Dear, dear," Ansalem said as he rose to greet them. "I've met you before, haven't I? Both of you. Or are you both the same person? King Carus, isn't it?"

  "I'm Carus," the king said with and easy smile. "This is my many-times-grandson Garric."

  His quick glance took in the whole the room. The mid-morning sun would enter through the alabaster as well as through the holes in a creamy effect that softened what would otherwise have been glare.

  "And we've met before, yes," Garric said. "When you brought me here the first time, Master Ansalem."

  "Did I really?" Ansalem said, peering around the littered room with a puzzled expression. "Oh, I scarcely think I did that, my boy. I couldn't have, surely. This chamber is closed off from all the rest of the cosmos. You don't really exist, you see: you're just my dream."

  Instead of answering, Carus rapped his knuckles on the window grill beside him. The electrum frame bonged musically.

  Ansalem nodded, looking even more puzzled than before. "Yes," he said, "that is strange, isn't it? But you can't be real."

  He reached toward a bookshelf and paused with a moue of frustration when he realized that all his books were gone. "Purlio!" he shouted. "Master Purlio, come here at once!"

  His voice echoed. There was no other sound.

  "I think my acolytes must have closed me off here," Ansalem said. He sounded more interested than concerned. "Why do you suppose they did that? You haven't seen them, have you, Purlio and the rest? But no, you couldn't have. You don't really exist."

  "I met your Purlio when I was here in my own flesh," Carus said bluntly. "I thought he was a nasty piece of work, and the other six with him not much better."

  "What?" said Ansalem in mile surprise. "Oh, they're not so bad. Quite clever, all of them, though--"

  His cherubic face clouded.

  "--they really shouldn't have walled me off here while I was so tired from removing Klestis from the waking world. I was going to...."

  Ansalem's eyes suddenly focused on Carus. Garric, watching the old man, suddenly saw that beneath the childlike innocence was a core as powerful and amoral as the lightning.

  "You were very angry that I wouldn't join the great crusade you were mounting against all your enemies, weren't you, Carus?" the old man asked.

  Carus shrugged grimly. "They were the enemies of civilization, but--" he smiled; with some humor, though not a great deal "--yes, I did tend to confuse myself with civilization back in those days. As for angry, no. Not with you, at least."

  Carus turned to the windows and looked out. In the streets below, the terrified citizens stood in the gleaming streets of ancient Klestis.

  "I thought you were a short-sighted fool," the king said, returning his attention to Ansalem. "As indeed you were. But with the advantage of hindsight, I realize I was a short-sighted fool as well in trying to solve all my problems with my swordarm."

  "I knew I didn't have enough power to save all the Isles," Ansalem said, protesting mildly rather than flying into one of the petulant rages Garric had seen the first time he was brought to this place. "Besides, the kingdom wasn't my business. My duty was only to Klestis and its citizens, so that's who I saved."

  "You didn't save them, sir," Garric said. "The city's as dead as the sea bottom now. Despite what you see from the window here."

  "Is it really?" Ansalem said. He sat on the bier again, knitting his fingers together in concern. "I wasn't able to complete my plan, you see, because I'm still sleeping here. How much time has gone by? I'm afraid it's very long, isn't it?"

  "A thousand years," said Carus. "Garric here is my descendent a thousand years after the time I drowned, Ansalem."

  The old wizard sighed. "Yes, I was afraid of that," he said. "It really had to be for you to enter my dreams this way, you see. Only when the forces are at a millennial peak would that be possible."

  Ansalem stood, showing for the first time the weariness of old age. He touched places on his bookshelf, here caressing a missing codex, there tapping the roller of the scroll that should have been in a particular pigeonhole. "You see," he went on, "when you died, Carus--"

  He turned toward the king with the quickness of a frog snatching prey.

  "You did die, didn't you?" Ansalem asked with the sharpness of one who expects to get an honest answer, and promptly.

  Carus shrugged. "My body drowned," he said. "I'm not a philosopher or a priest to tell you about the rest. But I'm here, now."

  "Here in my dream, yes," Ansalem said, genial again. "Well, I had no need of scrying mirrors or divination spells to know what would happen to the Isles when you'd finally failed. I took Klestis out of time to preserve it from the chaos to come. Next...."

  He turned and surveyed the empty bookshelves and the niches which had held objects to focus the powers on which the cosmos turned. This time he didn't try to touch the missing treasures. His visage was momentarily hard and old in an inhuman fashion, the way a mountain is old.

  "I was very tired, you see," Ansalem continued quietly. "It was a great work. I alone could have achieved it!"

  He glared at Garric and Carus as if daring them to gainsay him. The old wizard was a child again with a child's boastfulness--and the power to move a city out of time, as he clearly had done.

  Garric folded his hands over the sash of his sleeping tunic of plain wool, the only garment he wore in this dream state. He nodded agreement. It was like facing a caldera of bubbling rock, wondering if the next instant would bring a burp of fire to incinerate him and all else around.

  Ansalem sighed, shrinking into himself. "I was tir
ed and I slept," he said softly. "When I awakened I would have moved Klestis a thousand years into the future when peace and stability were reestablished. I didn't want my people to suffer through the ruin to come."

  Garric smiled wryly. "I wouldn't call the present--my present, I mean," he said, "either peaceful or stable, but I'll grant that it's better than what happened immediately after the collapse of the Old Kingdom. For the time being, at least. The trick will be to keep it that way, and your bridge from Klestis to our world is making that harder, sir."

  "Bridge?" said Ansalem. "I don't remember making a bridge. But there's so much I don't remember. You say it's all gone out there?"

  He gestured, not to the window overlooking the city but rather to the alabaster screen from behind which the benevolent despot Ansalem the Wise granted audience to the folk of Klestis. From inside this chamber Garric could see fruit trees growing in the planters and the bordering beds of portulocca that waved in a mild breeze. There were no people here, however.

  "Yes," said Carus. "All gone. There's nothing but a waste. There aren't even goats to crop the grass in the streets."

  "That's because I never woke up," the old wizard said, shaking his head in an attempt to understand what he knew had happened. "Why do you suppose Purlio and the others would have sealed me in here in my dreams? They must have known that Klestis couldn't survive without me. Didn't they?"

  "Maybe they didn't care," Carus said. He hooked his thumbs in his swordbelt, facing Ansalem like the grim statue of a war god. "Certainly they didn't care."

  "Sir?" said Garric. "We need to break the enchantment and return you to where you belong. Can you tell us how to do that?"

  "Oh, you can't do that, boy," the old wizard said with a dismissive wave. "Only the amphisbaena could do that, and--"

  As Ansalem spoke, Garric felt a force snatch him with the suddenness of a released bowstring. The chamber blurred. Garric was rushing through time and space, watching the cosmos reverse about him.

  Faintly through the gray darkness he heard Ansalem saying, "--the amphisbaena is here with me!"

  Sharina had a stitch in her side from straining against the bird's unmoving talons. She hadn't noticed it in her relief at being dropped at last on the beach, but she surely did now.

  The rib muscles were a lance of gasping pain every time her right leg extended, and another punishing jolt when her toes touched the ground to take her weight.

  She dodged a dome of multiflora roses. They were lovely in season--the season was past--but also the worst brambles in the woods. Because Sharina was tired and hurting, she didn't allow enough clearance. A tendril drew three long cuts across her left forearm and snatched threads from the tip of her crimson sash as well.

  That'll show them I passed this way, she thought. But the villagers were following anyway, as relentless as yellow-jackets and as murderously inclined. Sharina heard them not very far behind her, calling to one another in vicious glee.

  The armored warriors would be a long way back. That didn't help, because if a score of peasants with rocks and choppers ringed their victim they were more than a match for even a swordsman like Garric--if they were willing to pay the price.

  The Pewle knife hung on a broad belt drawn tight so that it didn't flop while the wearer was in violent motion. Sharina didn't touch the hilt at the thought--it would have thrown off her stride--but she smiled grimly all the same. There'd be a price to pay before they brought this lone woman down, too.

  The track she'd followed away from the settlement had dribbled to nothingness half a mile back. Sharina kept running, picking her route with an eye well accustomed to the woods; but not these woods, and night was falling.

  "Lady," she mouthed. She was too fatigued for a proper prayer. "Lady, help me Your servant."

  A clearing--it wasn't really a clearing; it was a broad swath on which all the growth was stunted--cut through the forest at a diagonal to Sharina's path. She swung left rather than make the acute angle to the right that would have brought her back more in the direction of her pursuers. The villagers might know, must know, about this stretch of relatively easy going. They'd be cutting through the woods already to block their prey if she tried to double back on it.

  Sharina didn't try to hide in the taller growth on the other side instead of running in one direction or the other along the track. Her cape wasn't long enough to cover her bleached-wool tunics, and they'd flash like fire in the moonlit forest. Her skin was paler yet, and her hair was a bright blond flag to signal those who wanted her life.

  She thought at first that she was following a seam of dense volcanic rock, less permeable to water and seeds struggling to root themselves than the limestone that underlay most of the terrain. The path was too straight, though, and too broad: twenty feet across, and more regular that most of the streets in Valles.

  This was a boulevard: an ancient roadway laid with such skill that the only purchase for roots was the thin layer of soil that had drifted over the pavement during centuries of disuse.

  Sharina brushed aside a stunted pine and strode through the bed of ivy that carpeted a wide stretch of the path. Her toes easily tore the stems, tossing behind her a trail of the soft, broad leaves.

  Birds lifted from overhanging branches in a chorus of whirrs and the clatter of wings against the foliage. She'd disturbed doves or perhaps quail who'd already roosted for the night.

  The roadway intersected an overgrown wall at a corbelled arch that must have been thirty feet tall when it was complete. The top had fallen in. The head that had originally glared down on those passing through the entrance now lay in the gateway on a pile of the small squared stones into which it had been set.

  The head was that of a serpent, sculpted in a squared idiom that made it more, not less, awesome to unfamiliar eyes like Sharina's. The jaws were large enough to envelope her torso had they been flesh and not stone; a forked tongue curled out of them. Florid carvings, some of them lesser heads, covered all the surfaces of the great bust.

  Sharina put her hand on the cold stone as she slipped past, slowing lest she turn an ankle on the jumble of overgrown stones.

  She'd reached the great complex she'd seen while she hung in the bird's claws. She couldn't turn aside now. The boulevard was a notch in the canopy, allowing more sunlight to penetrate to ground level than it did elsewhere in the forest. In that bounty the vegetation to either side had grown impenetrable with honeysuckle and thorns.

  It didn't matter: Sharina couldn't run much farther with this fire in her side, and perhaps it was time to make a stand anyway.

  She stepped out of the direct sight of those pursuing and took stock. A street extended the line of the boulevard. The building to her immediate right was a ruin whose original outline was beyond imagining. A gigantic oak tree grew from piled rocks whose squared corners were the only evidence the mound wasn't natural.

  Beyond that ruin was a structure at least a hundred and fifty feet long. Like the exterior walls and all the other visible buildings, it was made from granite rather than the limestone Sharina had seen along the seashore and in outcrops in the settlers' clearing. Flecks of mica and other glittering inclusions winked in the waning skyglow.

  Roses and long-needle pines grew up the building's high facade; in many places their roots had levered off the ornamental moldings. Piles of richly-carved ashlars, some of them broken when they fell, lay against the front wall, blocking two of the entrances and almost the third nearest Sharina.

  It was as good a covert as any. She patted the knife, then mounted the heaped stones to the opening at the very top of the corbelled arch. She climbed with all four limbs, holding rough-barked trunks for support while her toes found purchase in the carved faces of monkeys, lizards, and less identifiable creatures.

  Another serpent head projected above the sharp peak. Sharina squirmed beneath it and into the darkness of the building's interior.

  The piled debris was much steeper on this side. In order to keep from fal
ling head-first, Sharina grabbed the notch which must ages ago have held a wooden doorframe. Carefully she swung her torso around and found footholds so that she could wait just below the opening with her knife ready. She opened her mouth wide so that her gasps wouldn't give her away.

  Though the villagers would learn where she was as soon as one of them tried to crawl through this hole. They had to come at her one at a time unless they decided to pull down a mass of hard stones woven about by brambles and tree roots. That wouldn't be an easy job or a short one, even by daylight.

  Neither would getting through the existing hole while Sharina waited with a knife that could whack through a wrist-thick sapling with a single stroke. She smiled with a dark humor. She hadn't asked them to become her enemies.

  As Sharina's hammering pulse slowed, she heard her leading pursuers arrive. Voices, all of them male, were arguing in nervous, winded tones. She couldn't make out the words. They seemed to be some distance away still.

  Deciding that being able to see her enemies was worth the risk, Sharina raised her eyes slowly over the lip of piled debris. Dim light and the pale stone of this city would confuse her outline even if one of the villagers was looking straight at the opening.

  As she'd thought, her pursuers had halted at the gate pillars. They peered through the opening while trying to keep their distance from the serpent head. There were half a dozen young men and one fellow with a stone-gray beard and ridged muscles on his arms and bare thighs. More villagers arrived as Sharina watched.

  The argument continued, obviously going nowhere. Each newcomer spoke; those already present answered in tones of increasing frustration. The light was failing.

  The older man squatted with a flint knife and a handful of pithy canes he'd gathered from the margins of the boulevard. He arranged his fireset, then struck a quick blow to the end of a piston igniter. He spilled pressure-heated shavings onto the waiting punk and blew the glow to full life.