Servant of the Dragon Read online

  The People's flesh was black and shrunken; sometimes the strands broke when Cashel unrolled them. Their touch left sticky smears on his skin; he'd want to wash as soon as he found water.

  Elfin stood by the wall as he'd done since leading Cashel to his seat. The youth's fingers rested on the strings of his lyre, but he didn't pluck them or sing. Cashel couldn't read the expression on his face.

  "Thank you, Krias," Cashel said. Croaked, really; he must have shouted his throat raw in the fight.

  "Not bad, if I do say myself," the demon chirped. "And not before time, either. It's no concern to me whose dinner pot you fill, but I'd regret having to serve King Wella for the rest of eternity."

  Cashel's skin prickled worse than a bad sunburn. He looked at his forearm and saw what he'd thought was true: the fine hairs on it were gone like he'd reached too close to a fire. He patted his forehead and found he'd singed his eyebrows, too.

  The People lay scattered across the floor of the chamber, shrivelled and dead. Cashel could tell which was the king by the red robe. The blackened flesh was sloughing away from bones that looked less human than the People had seemed in life.

  Cashel found his quarterstaff against the far wall. He picked it up and let the touch of smooth hickory against his palms settle him. He felt....

  The People hadn't deserved any better than they got; but what they got wasn't something Cashel would have wished on anybody. Well, it was over, and he wasn't about to complain about a result that left him able to continue on after Sharina.

  The light within the chamber was fading. The walls still had color, but it was the sullen shimmer of a coal about to go black.

  "I don't mean to intrude on your philosophical revery, master," said Krias, "but the King of the Forest is dying. Far be it from me to dissuade you if you've chosen to end your miserable existence in this fashion, but if you don't want a tree to collapse on you...?"

  "Oh," Cashel said. "Thanks."

  He crossed the quarterstaff before him and twisted his torso right, then left, working the kinks out of his shoulder muscles. It hadn't been much of a fight on Cashel's part; more like trying to swim in a block of ice that gripped him everywhere and wouldn't move. He'd put everything he had into it, though, he'd tell the world!

  The oak groaned like a storm was twisting it. It wouldn't stand long; and Cashel guessed it'd stood longer already than it should've.

  He strode toward the opening and found it larger than he remembered; punk wood was flaking away from the edges the way it did when the wind ripped a limb from an old elm and showed the hollow heart.

  Elfin stood motionless. It was so dark now that he could have been a stain on the dank wood.

  "Are you coming?" Cashel said.

  Elfin said nothing, but Cashel heard the lyre whisper.

  "Do as you please!" Cashel said, and stepped out into the forest. He felt weak and angry, and the red light outside had an evil shimmer that brought no balm to his soul.

  Garric stepped onto the roof of Alae. Even the wind blowing fiercely in his face didn't fill his lungs with air. He felt as though he were being whipped with cobwebs too fine to see.

  Near the edge of the building, facing west over the barren desert, was a sapphire throne that had been made for giants. A man of normal size sat in it now.

  The roof was empty of all except the wind, the throne, and the person on it. Garric helped Tenoctris up the last step. His tunic fluttered and his sword shivered against its scabbard.

  "He's there, I think," Garric murmured with a nod toward the throne. "Somebody is."

  Tenoctris smiled, but she didn't waste breath speaking. Between her two younger friends, she walked with short steps to the side of the throne.

  Close up it seemed even bigger than it had from the head of the stairs. It was in scale with its surroundings: the flat plain of the roof; the horizon beyond the city's half-submerged limits, empty in all directions; and a sky of brilliant, unwinking stars.

  "Lord Alman," Tenoctris said in a surprisingly firm voice. From here only the head of the seated man was visible over the throne's crystal arm. "We've come from a time past your own to ask your help in forestalling chaos."

  For a moment nothing happened. Then, as slow as a winter dawn, a man turned on the stone seat to look down at them. He placed his hand on the chair arm.

  "Am I dreaming, I wonder?" he said. His voice cracked with disuse and dry air.

  Garric reached up to squeeze Alman's hand. The wizard's bones and sinews were prominent beneath a thin coating of flesh. "We're real, sir," he said.

  "So it seems," Alman said. "Or else I've lost my mind entirely, of course. In either case I suppose I'd better join you. A moment, please."

  Alman turned, then slowly backed down the three high steps from the seat. Garric didn't think the throne had ever been meant for use; though on the other hand, an empty chair made an odd monument.

  "I didn't think anyone could find me here," Alman said, looking at his visitors with a mixture of interest and puzzlement. He was younger than Garric had first thought: no older than Reise, certainly. Alman's hair had thinned back from his forehead, but the half that remained was black. His skin was dry and wind-cracked, but his face wasn't a mass of wrinkles like that of Tenoctris.

  "Your power meant people were aware of you despite your reclusiveness," Tenoctris said. "Even so I wouldn't have been able to locate you, let alone visit you in your seclusion, except for the crisis that my age faces."

  She made a slight gesture to wipe away a partial misstatement. "The age which I now call mine," she said, correcting herself.

  Alman shrugged. "I suppose we may as well go down," he said. "Now that you've awakened me, I find I'm thirsty. And I suppose I should eat something as well."

  Alman moved and spoke with the frailty of the very old. Tenoctris was old, but that was only a weakness of her body: her intellect and personality were as sprightly as a three-year-old's. Alman had one foot in another world. Everything about him projected an aura of gray dullness.

  Head bowed, he walked to the head of the staircase. Garric strode ahead to lead as he'd done on the way up. No threat would follow them from the empty roof. There probably wouldn't be any danger below either, but Garric knew without King Carus' approving nod that this was no place to take unnecessary chances.

  "There is no place to take unnecessary chances, lad," the king whispered in Garric's mind. "Of course, there's no place for a leader who won't take necessary chances, either."

  Garric thought of offering Alman his arm, but on consideration he decided that might be taken as an insult. The wizard had climbed the stairs unaided, after all, and he almost certainly made the journey up and down on a regular basis.

  "We've come to borrow the Lens of Rushila, Lord Alman," Tenoctris said. "I say 'borrow,' but it may be that I'll be unable to return the lens to you if I'm successful in ridding our age of the gateway that threatens us."

  Tenoctris was last down the stairs, her hand on Liane's shoulder. The treads were narrow, and the lack of a railing made even Garric frown. It'd be a bad place to fall.

  "The Lens of Rushila?" Alman said after a pause so long that Garric had given up on an answer. "Yes, I have that. I think I do, anyway. I don't really remember what I brought with me to Alae."

  "A wizard has opened a gateway to our age," Tenoctris said, though Alman hadn't asked for an explanation. "I'm not strong enough to reach him through an ordinary scrying ritual. With the lens I can view the wizard and get a better idea of what his purpose might be."

  "The Lens of Rushila," Alman repeated with an expression of wonder. "I was so very proud when I split the rock and raised to the light for the first time since...."

  He shook his head. "Since time began as men know time, perhaps," he said. "Since our world was formed."

  Garric reached the ground and sighed with relief. The staircase trembled like a sparrow's heart through the soles of his boots, vibrating to the rhythm of the wind. The spiral seeme
d as solid as the day it was built, but... well, it was good to stand on stone again.

  "The lens came from the eye of a creature older than the stars," Alman said. He walked toward the part of the relief where Garric had found the trove of foraged food. "Rushila conjectured its existence but he never found the lens. I alone could do that!"

  For a moment Garric saw a different Alman--a wizard of unexcelled power, arrogant in his strength. His words waked echoes from the rotunda's high ceiling. Then the memory passed and Alman, weak from privations and older than his years, hunched in on himself in a series of wracking coughs.

  Garric put an arm around him for support and said, "Sir, do you have water here? I'll get you a drink."

  Alman raised a hand in denial. "No," he said when he regained control of his throat. "No, I was only laughing at myself."

  He shuffled to the collection of food, holding Garric's arm for the first few steps. He took a knife with a gold-chased blade from the sheath tucked into his sash. Removing a bulb the size of his head from the store, he stabbed through the top in a circular coring motion. Alman lifted the plug between the thumb and forefinger of the hand that held the dagger, then tiltted the bulb to suck deeply from the opening.

  "Is that your only source of water?" Liane asked.

  "It's mine!" Alman said, hugging the bulb to his chest with one arm and waggling the dagger wildly with the other. His eyes and expression cleared. "Oh," he said. "I... I've been remiss; you're my guests, after all. Would you like...?"

  He offered the bulb hesitantly. A trickle of pulp leaked from the opening. It was the consistency of thin gruel and smelled strongly of turpentine. The odor and the thought of drinking it made Garric's stomach turn, though he hoped he managed to keep his reaction off his face.

  "No thank you," Liane said calmly. "We'll be going back soon."

  She glanced toward Tenoctris. "Yes, that's right," the old wizard said. "As soon as we have the Lens, we'll leave you in peace, Lord Alman. Unless.... Would you like to come back with us?"

  "It's only that the water roots are getting harder to find," Alman said apologetically. "I have to go farther and farther to find them. And I don't want to leave Alae because of the throne."

  He looked up the spiral length of the staircase to the roof opening. "In my room in Sandine I had a glass," he said, "in which I summoned the wizards of former times. I drew Rushila to me. He came and answered my questions, for he was dead and I had the power of the living over the dead. I called up others, gained their knowledge and added to it my own researches. I had the wisdom of all ages at my fingertips!"

  Again Garric heard the power that underlay the speech. The vast building, or at least Garric's perception of it, shimmered to the rhythm of Alman's words.

  "Then I realized," Alman said, shrinking into a man again and a frail man besides, "that despite my power some day I would die. Another wizard would arise and I would be a shadow in his glass, dancing to his tune for eternities to come. So I smashed my glass and came here to Alae. When I die there will be no one left to command me. I sit on the throne of God and watch the sun set, waiting for the day it will no longer rise."

  "May we borrow the Lens now, Lord Alman?" Tenoctris said quietly. "We should be going, and you have your own affairs to attend."

  "Yes, yes," said Alman. He drank again from the bulb, this time sucking with desperate insistence to gain the last of the moisture from the thick rind. He capped the hole carefully with the plug and set the bulb back into a niche of the mural.

  "Sometimes more drains down if I let it sit for a little while," he explained.

  Garric was afraid to speak. Anything he said might have sounded like an insult, and they needed Alman's help. In his mind, the stone-faced Carus said, "If anybody treated a prisoner of mine this way, I'd have the skin off his back as quick as I could uncoil a whip. But this man's done it to himself."

  Alman paused, then noticed his three visitors again. "Oh!" he said in mild surprise. "You're still here. Yes, I was going to give you the Lens of Rushila. It's in the place where I sleep. Out of the wind, you see."

  He shuffled toward the vast double doors and slipped between them into the starlit night. Tenoctris nodded; Garric followed at Alman's heels while Liane and the older woman came after. Outside was a semi-circular plaza bordered by a low coping. Drifting sand had covered what once was the vista beyond.

  For all the wind's echoing whistle in the rotunda, its force was noticeably greater outside. Here at ground level the thin air used sand-grains for teeth, nibbling at the skin of Garric's calves above his boot-tops.

  "Sometimes I fall asleep on the throne," Alman said. "It's so cold there, though. Once I had to crawl down the stairs because I was too stiff to stand."

  They were shuffling toward the mouth of a storm drain set into the coping. Garric looked out at the horizon, amazed at the thought of violent rain buffeting this dry wasteland. That--more than the ruined state of the buildings--drove home to him how extremely old Alae must be.

  "Here it is," Alman said, kneeling at the entrance. The stone was recessed for a metal grate, but that had perished long since. Alman crawled through, his bare feet vanishing like those of a vole hopping into a crack in the rocks.

  Garric squatted at the entrance. He could fit, even with his sword slung, but he wasn't sure he wanted to crawl down a dark hole without some better notion of what waited him there. "Do you have light, sir?" he called.

  "Light?" Alman repeated. "Oh. Oh, I'm sure I can find it...."

  Tenoctris sat before the figure she'd scratched in the sand with one of the bamboo splints from the satchel Liane carried. "Thai picale," she murmured, tapping the miniature wand on the syllables as she pronounced them. "Huprista...."

  "I'm sure it must be here somewhere," Alman said a muffled voice. Garric heard objects clack. He winced, though the Lens of Rushila must be fairly sturdy to have been blasted out of rock to begin with. "It couldn't have gone anywhere, after all."

  The plaza was paved in swirling patterns of white and gray stone, or perhaps white and colors which Garric couldn't determine in the faint starlight. Sand had risen to this level in something more than a dusting but not yet a complete layer.

  In the sand near the drain were marks that could have been the prints of shod feet--not his own.

  Or the marks could be insect paths. Whatever had caused them, they were sharp and recent.

  "Konaioi!" said Tenoctris. Blue light bloomed in the center of her hexagon, a fist-sized ball as faint as foxfire. It rolled like thistledown across the pavement and down the mouth of the drain. Without pausing to ask, Garric followed the light.

  He was in a masonry chamber so low that he had to squat for his head to clear the ceiling. A pipe joined on either hand. Sand choked the one on the left; the other was blocked by human debris--containers made of wood, glass, and stone, some broken, lying every which way. Alman was rummaging in the collection, discarding the unwanted pieces onto the pile of fabric on the chamber's floor.

  "See?" he said without turning around. His voice reverberated from the pipe, blurring without gaining strength. "This is my athame. The Lens should be with it."

  He tossed the spell knife behind him. It had been forged from strips of iron and silver woven into patterns as ornate as any creation of Ilna's. The metals gleamed with their different lusters in the bluish wizardlight.

  Garric lifted the pieces of cloth, a velvet robe and the tatters of a tunic of transparently fine silk, and sorted through it while the wizard dug. Another little beetle tumbled out and scuttled to a shadowed corner. The cloth was empty except for the things Alman had just tossed onto it.

  "I don't understand," Alman said. He reached as deeply into the pipe as his arm would stretch. "Where could it have gone? Did I not bring the Lens with me after all?"

  "Let me try," said Garric. He moved the wizard aside--not harshly, but Alman's thin frame seemed to have no weight at all. The wizardlight drifted to the mouth of the pipe, then slip
ped inside. Garric could see the seams between blocks in a regular pattern that went on for--

  He jerked himself back and blinked, then rubbed his eyes. There was something hypnotizing about the pattern within the masonry: the builders had done more than join stone to stone. Garric was sure there was nothing bigger than a grain of sand within the pipe.

  The drain inlet was pale and the only light remaining within the chamber. "Let's get out now, Lord Alman," Garric said. "I don't think we're going to find the Lens."

  Garric pulled himself up, feeling weak. His head was beginning to ache, and his eyes itched from grit and dryness. "Tenoctris," he said. "It isn't here. I think someone's been here before us."

  Garric frowned as he thought of how fresh the maybe-footprints looked. He couldn't be sure, but....

  "I think somebody may have taken the Lens while we were looking for Lord Alman," he said. "Is that possible?"

  Tenoctris nodded. "Yes," she said. "It is. Someone watching me could follow, if they were powerful enough. I don't know precisely what it means, but--"

  She flashed her smile at Garric and Liane.

  "--I'm confident that it doesn't mean anything that would please me."

  Alman climbed out of the drain. He moved with aged care of a tortoise.

  "Lord Alman?" Tenoctris said. "Thank you for attempting to help us. We won't trouble you again."

  "I can't think where it could have gone," Alman said, shaking his head in puzzlement. "I'm sure I would have brought it here to Alae with me. I was so proud of owning the Lens of Rushila."

  A shooting star flashed across the heaven, looking much closer than the ones Garric had seen at night on Haft. It was briefly as vivid as a comet.

  Alman had watched the streak of fire also. "The Lens of Rushila was part of the eye of a creature older than our world," he said musingly. "Older than our portion of the cosmos. And yet it died. All things die."

  "In order to return, I need to draw my spell where we entered this plane," Tenoctris said quietly. She took a grip on Liane's arm.