Servant of the Dragon Read online

  For half an eyeblink, Ilna had thought Chalcus was going to pat her. She'd have--

  She blinked in confusion, then chuckled. Ilna didn't know what she'd have done. Well, it hadn't happened.

  "Ilna?" the child asked. "Is something funny?"

  "I'm laughing at myself, Merota," Ilna said. "Perhaps that's funny, yes."

  Chalcus was a leader. Certainly he could have led a more impressive gang than these bumbling mutineers. Mastyn had been the only one of them with real drive, and Chalcus could have handled the fellow as easily as Ilna herself had.

  "Is that where we're spending the night?" Merota asked. She kept her voice calm, but Ilna could hear the tension underlying the words. Even Vonculo and his fellows could see this island was no place to land, but they let hope and desperation pull them forward regardless.

  "This night at least," Ilna said quietly. "I don't see any sign of streets covered with gold and jewels, but perhaps that's because the light's bad."

  The Ravager was surging forward. The Terror had been slower getting under way than her consort, but the rowers were driving them on strongly now.

  Chalcus grinned at Ilna over his oar. The island's shadow fell across the ship, but she could see the wink of the chanteyman's teeth.

  The Ravager's lookout screamed and pitched forward from his perch. Oars flailed wildly as the rowers rolled off their benches.

  "Hold on to me, child!" Ilna said. She squatted and wrapped her arms around Merota, then gripped the railing on the other side of the girl.

  "Reverse stroke!" Chalcus shouted, jumping up to brace himself between his bench and the loom of his oar.

  The Terror slid to a sucking halt. Crewmen, bits of gear, and baggage that hadn't been secured properly after the mutineers rummaged through it, bounced toward the trireme's bow.

  The lookout saw the trouble coming and slid to safety down the backstay, but the mast itself whipped forward under the sudden stress. It didn't snap, but Ilna heard wood crackle dangerously over the shouts of startled sailors. They'd have to splint the mast before putting the strain of a sail on it.

  Ilna smiled without humor. It might be premature to consider how the ships were going to be repaired.

  She rose, still sheltering Merota. The trireme remained upright, though the Ravager several lengths ahead was slowly tilting onto her left side. The water around both vessels swirled in dark patterns.

  Chalcus made his way back to them. The Terror's helmsman had pitched over the bow railing at the impact. Vonculo and another sailor had jumped down onto the trireme's ram to help the fellow back aboard. Half a dozen men were shouting orders, none of them to any purpose that Ilna could see.

  "And again," said the chanteyman, "it might be that a school of the Great Ones was swimming over a mud bottom not a pace below the surface. Another thing I've never seen before, but I should've told Vonculo to put out a leadsman before we shifted closer."

  He looked toward the shore. The island was in full darkness. Lamps gleamed on the other vessel. The Ravager carried a skiff, and a party was sliding her across the deck tilted like a ramp.

  "What should we do, Ilna?" Merota asked quietly. She was watching Chalcus.

  Ilna shrugged. "Wait or swim, I suppose," she said. "And speaking for myself, I can't swim. Can the ship get free of this, Master Chalcus?"

  "After the tide turns," the chanteyman said, "which should be in about six hours. When the moon's there."

  He pointed his left arm toward a spot midway between zenith and the western horizon. Two fingers of his right hand rested lightly on his sword's eared pommel in what Ilna didn't think was a conscious gesture.

  "That's if we haven't sprung the hull strakes," he added with a sour grimace. "Which I doubt we have on mud, but I've seen eggshells built sturdier than a warship's hull. Pine's light and easy to work, I'll grant you, but give me an ironwood Lataeene two-banker if I'm going to come aboard another ship under way."

  "The Lataeene Islands are the Pirate Islands, aren't they, Master Chalcus?" Merota asked. Innocently, Ilna supposed, because the child really was innocent.

  "I've heard them called that, mistress," Chalcus said, his voice as flowing and normal as ever. "But you mustn't believe everything you hear."

  He looked over Merota's head to Ilna. "Though some might be true, that's so," he added with the same false unconcern.

  "Some day I may tell you about what I did when I first lived in Erdin," Ilna said evenly, her eyes on the skiff drawing closer to the land. A sailor stood in the bow with a lantern, though it couldn't have shone any distance ahead. The scouts going ashore were frightened and using the light to reassure themselves.

  In fact, Ilna didn't intend ever to tell Chalcus in detail about the amulets she'd woven for any woman who had the money. Love charms that really worked, visual spells that drew men despite any bonds of love or duty or honor that worked to hold them back.

  Ilna had no idea of how many murders and suicides, how much misery in a thousand other ways, she'd caused with the ribbons she wove. The cost hadn't mattered to her at the time Evil ruled her, and it didn't really matter now. All that mattered was Ilna's knowledge that though she spent her whole lifetime trying to repay the damage she'd caused, she'd never be able to do enough.

  So Chalcus had been a pirate? There were people who had a right to judge him for that, but Ilna os-Kenset wasn't among them.

  The skiff must have reached the shore, though except for the lantern there was no way of distinguishing the sailors from the island. The sky looked bright, but it cast no light on the surface beneath. The Ravager was closer to land than it was to the Terror; the leading vessel had been following a channel of sorts through the underwater mudbank.

  "The tide has another hour to fall," Chalcus said, watching the land. Ilna wondered if the sailor could see more in the darkness than she could. "I think we bellied deep enough into the mud that we won't topple over the way that lot did."

  He nodded toward the Ravager, now lying on her side with her port rail in the water. Men were crawling over the trireme with lamps and tools, cursing one another and shouting demands to their fellows on the Terror. Vonculo shouted back, but for the most part the Terror's crew seemed ready to wait for news from their consort's scouting party.

  "And while it's cramped quarters if we spend the night aboard," Chalcus added with a broader specimen of his usual grin, "I think I'd just as soon be here as there tonight. Not so?"

  "Yes, I agree," Ilna said. She squeezed Merota's shoulder.

  "I have some bread and cheese," Ilna went on. "Since we won't have a cooking fire--"

  The lantern ashore spun in a high arc, starting to drop just before it went out. Why don't they shout something? Ilna thought, but the scream was only a few heartbeats behind the sparks of spinning light. She'd forgotten the distance to the shore.

  The scream cut off suddenly. For a moment there was silence, marked only by the whisper of waves and the sobbing of a sailor nearby.

  Something on shore started laughing. The sound was too loud and terrible to come from a human throat. It continued in echoing peals, fading slowly, until it ended as though the creature had gone behind a hill. Ilna thought she still heard hints of the manic hilarity, ever fainter.

  "Ilna os-Kenset!" Vonculo shouted. "Wizard! Come here!"

  Chapter Fourteen

  "Anhira panton phrougi," Tenoctris said; then, jabbing her little wand down into the center of the figure, "Atithe!"

  A whirlwind spun upward, swifter and carrying more material than the thin air of this desert could have lifted. The vortex scavenged down to the pavement beneath the drifted sand, then dug deeper yet as it expanded.

  Azure sparks spun among the sand-grains. Garric leaned backward, putting a hand on each of the women as the walls of the vortex swept over them. The hole at their feet plunged down to--

  Garric, Liane and Tenoctris crouched at the mouth of a tunnel, not a pit toward the center of the world. The walls had a fiery blue translu
cence, sometimes sagging inward as though something heavy constricted the tube.

  Tenoctris slumped forward; Garric caught her. "We have to go on," she whispered, her eyes closed with exhaustion. "Help me if you can."

  If I can! Garric thought. He scooped the old woman up in his arms, resting her head on his right shoulder. Liane gave him a nod and a tight smile. She'd already shouldered the satchel holding the paraphernalia of Tenoctris' art. Side by side, they started down the glowing tunnel.

  The air was dry and without character, but at least it was thick enough to breathe. Garric felt as though he'd surfaced after too long underwater. He didn't understand how Alman could choose to live the way he did.

  He glanced back over his shoulder, but the tunnel stretched infinitely far in that direction also. Liane saw the gesture and said, "It wouldn't have been right to drag Lord Alman back against his will." Then, "Would it?

  "I didn't think so," Garric said. He shook his head. "He's safe where he is, I suppose."

  "He could be safer still," said Carus, "if he hanged himself. I can forgive a lot in a man, but not cowardice. That one's afraid to live!"

  Garric thought of the times he'd been frightened. The most recent occasion had been while he waited at the Valles riverfront, while Tenoctris spoke her spell and the bridge glowered behind them as a symbol of uncanny power.

  Garric could follow the line of memories back to when he was three if not younger. He'd trembled as he waited in the common room for his father to learn he hadn't done the reading lesson he'd been set....

  All the memories had the same thing in common: Garric hadn't been able to act, or it was too late to act. So long as there was something for him to do, he was fine.

  Garric let out a peal of honest laughter as King Carus laughed in his mind. Liane glanced at him. Tenoctris, barely conscious on Garric's shoulder, murmured something unintelligible.

  "I was just thinking," Garric said to his friends. "It's good that I'm, well, Prince Garric now. That means I won't run out of things to do any time soon."

  Liane blinked. She reached past Tenoctris to grip Garric's hand and said, "I don't know if you're joking or serious, Garric. I--you confuse me. But I'm glad I'm with you."

  She sounded half-desperate; not afraid, but confused almost past bearing. Garric squeezed her hand and said, "Mostly serious, I guess. I'm fine if I don't have to sit still and wait for something to happen."

  He cleared his throat. "I'm glad we're together too," he added.

  The tunnel's walls were becoming either thinner or clearer as the three continued. At first Garric thought the speckles and lines he saw were flaws in the blue translucence itself, but the spots had motion of their own. By the time Garric and his friends were another hundred paces down the corridor, he could see images moving alongside them.

  Liane eyed the tunnel walls, her face serious but calm. She glanced toward Garric.

  "Yeah," he said, "I see them too."

  He bent his head slightly to look at Tenoctris, but the old wizard had fallen back into the sleep of exhaustion. The visit to Alman had made physical demands on all of them, and Tenoctris had the effort of the incantations besides.

  "I think there's something ahead of us," Garric said, resisting the impulse to start running. All he could see was a change in the featureless azure light. The tunnel didn't constrain them tightly--Garric couldn't have jumped high enough to reach the curved ceiling--but its smooth emptiness was as confining as the desert outside Alae's ruins.

  The walls were now a thin shimmer; Garric felt his feet sinking deeply into the floor as he strode forward. If he'd been walking on the log bridge, he'd have thought the wood was rotten and likely to give way at any instant. He glanced at Liane, but she didn't seem to notice anything. She didn't weigh half what Garric and Tenoctris did together, of course.

  Garric grinned wryly. Besides, noblewomen didn't have much experience of walking on rotten logs.

  "Umm?" said Liane, smiling in response to Garric's smile.

  "I was thinking that some folk's education is sadly lacking," Garric said cheerfully. He didn't intend to lie to Liane, but he didn't see much good in spreading gloom either.

  A barrier of scintillant gold closed the tunnel ahead of them. Garric's stomach drew in, wondering whether it would open or recede or--

  Or maybe neither of those things.

  The tunnel walls had become as clear as the isinglass curtains of a wealthy traveller's carriage. Marching beside them were men in armor, cavalry and footmen alike. The troops shambled forward silently, holding their ranks but moving with a lack of interaction that surprised Garric and amazed the king watching through his eyes. The figures were as shadowy as those of an army seen at twilight, but they were human beyond doubt.

  "They're walking on the bridge," Liane said quietly. "The bridge we see in Valles."

  She was right. Garric had been more interested in the soldiers, but the structure on which the army marched had the same filigree railings, the same twisted, multi-spired finials as the bridge that glowed at night over the River Beltis.

  The same bridge by which the dreaming Garric had crossed to Klestis.

  "I can see their standard," Liane said in an urgent undertone. "It's a crab, I think. I don't know any principality that uses a crab for its symbol, though."

  "Tenoctris?" Garric said. He didn't want to disturb the old wizard, but he didn't know what would happen if he touched the barrier.

  Tenoctris murmured in his arms. Her eyes opened and quickly focused on the figures marching alongside, paying no attention to the wall of light. Garric took another step, the last before they'd reach the barrier.

  "Should I keep going?" he said urgently.

  The tunnel dissolved like chaff in a bonfire. Garric stumbled forward on hard pavement, catching himself on one knee without dropping Tenoctris. Liane gasped beside him, and the detachment of Blood Eagles crashed down the street toward them at double-time.

  Garric and his friends were on the Valles riverfront again. False dawn had brightened the east, though the sun would still be a finger's breadth below the horizon.

  The bridge of wizardlight was fading. On it, becoming gray and transparent with the structure, the army continued to march. It was going toward Klestis.

  "I can tell you about the Crab, lad," King Carus said grimly. "It's the standard of the Dukes of Yole. But the army of Yole drowned when I did, a thousand years ago."

  Sharina squatted beside the slab. There wasn't any question which block the Dragon had meant: this three-foot length of hard white granite looked nothing like the crude limestone ashlars that made up the rest of the foundation layer. Identification aside, though, she couldn't imagine how she and Dalar were going to remove it.

  Dalar stood between her and the street, facing forward and back over his shoulder-blades in quick succession. He looked like an extreme example of a spectator watching both sides of a game of net-ball. Sharina was afraid that the bird's movements were going to attract more attention than they'd help, but she was too unsure of what she was doing to tell him to stop jerking his head around.

  "Well, he said...," she murmured, trying to grip the stone with her fingertips. To her amazement, it did have a greasy willingness to move; but whatever had happened to normal friction, the stone still weighed twice what she and Dalar did together.

  Sharina drew the Pewle knife and thrust it into the gap between the altar stone and the block to its left. She didn't like to use her only physical reminder of Nonnus as a prybar--but she needed a prybar, and this was what she had. Nonnus himself had trained her to remember that objects were only objects, and that human beings alone were worthy of real concern. Sharina's memory of her friend and the lessons he'd taught her were important; his knife was just a tool.

  She worked the blade gently sideways. Bits of mortar cascaded from the joints as though she was moving a block of ice, not stone. Sharina set a pebble in the crack to brace the stone, then slid the knife into the opposite j
oint. The steel was thick and of the best quality. It wouldn't snap under Sharina's careful use, though there'd be scratches to polish out as soon as she had a chance.

  The stone pivoted out a full two finger's breadth. Sharina wiped grit from the blade unconsciously before sheathing it. "Help me, Dalar," she said as she set the fingers of both hands against the left side of the stone.

  Dalar knelt on the other side of the block. Sharina pressed hard, sliding the stone forward at an angle. As it straightened, Dalar pressed and pulled also.

  The block scraped half its depth out into the alley before Sharina had to shift her grip. They could use their palms now. She'd wondered how strong the bird's thin arms really were. The answer appeared to be, "Quite strong enough."

  "Hey, what're you doing there?" someone shouted from the alley mouth. His shadow blocked half the dim light from the street.

  "We're fixing the foundation so the wall doesn't fall in!" Sharina shouted back. She made eye contact with Dalar and murmured, "Now."

  They heaved, scrambling backward as the block slid completely clear of the wall. Sharina's hands were on the verge of cramping from the strain. The edges of the granite were sharp. They didn't cut flesh, but they clamped off circulation in fingers pressed hard against them.

  "Fixing the foundation?" the voice said. "Hey, that don't make any sense. Leimon, come here and look at this."

  If Sharina had to, she'd fling a handful of silver ingots into the street. That should prove an adequate distraction to let her and Dalar escape.

  Though 'escape' probably wasn't the right word.

  "Once more," she said and gripped the back edge of the altar stone for a straight pull outward. They tugged together. The stone's weight resisted while Sharina's biceps bunched and the bird made a faint wheezing noise through his closed beak.

  When the block moved, it was with a frictionless rush that made the pair of them jump up quickly to avoid being crushed. Foolish! Sharina thought. As silly as cutting vegetables against the palm of my hand, and a good deal more dangerous!