Servant of the Dragon Read online

  Ilna heard the clicks and buzzing of insects rubbing their wing cases together. Birds hopped silently among the brushwood. The ground south of the orchard and field became a bog. In it frogs dived with a plop at the approach of humans--but they didn't croak, shrill, or peep.

  Most of the birds flitting through the reeds had lost their feathers, and a few were little more than frameworks of fine, hollow bone. Merota watched a crow scud past low, watching the humans with an empty eye-socket. The child lowered her eyes to the ground, but she didn't cry or even gasp.

  Chalcus whistled a dance tune as he walked, his gaze shifting as quickly as a butterfly's wings. There wasn't a path for them to follow, but he found a route of sorts a short way down from the edge. Here the ground was dry enough that their feet didn't sink in but too wet for woody plants to grow into an impenetrable tangle. The risen sun boiled a miasma from stagnant water. A light breeze blew inland, but within bowshot of the ridge the reeds and horsetails became wan forms among whorls of gray.

  "Now I would judge," said Chalcus, "that the headland is there--"

  He stretched out his left arm. They'd had to bear inland because of the footing or lack of it. Ilna saw nothing where the chanteyman pointed but solid brush, at least as tall and solid as what they'd climbed through from the shore. If Chalcus thought they'd come the correct distance down this blinkered path, though, she was confident he was right.

  "Now, getting to where we can see again...," he said. "Still, I think...."

  Even as the chanteyman spoke, he stepped into the unappealing wall of vegetation. Blackberry canes which grew amid the general mass of weeds and shrubs crackled beneath the soles of his horny feet.

  "Follow him closely, child," Ilna said. "Don't worry if your clothing catches. I can mend tears."

  Which assumed a number of things, not least that she and Merota would live long enough for mending clothes to be a worthwhile occupation; but Ilna did assume that. She smiled wryly. Perhaps she was more of an optimist than most of those who knew her would have guessed.

  "Ah, who would not be cheerful with heroes like you and me protecting them?" called Chalcus without turning his head. "Not so?"

  Is the man reading my mind?

  "We'll hope that's so," Ilna said aloud.

  Merota's hem hung on a blackberry. Before Ilna could reach down and loose it, the girl jerked the cloth free.

  Ilna smiled in silent approval. The child took direction as few adults seemed able to do, and the embroidered fabric hadn't ripped after all. Ilna liked to see evidence of good craftsmanship... which, like the ability to take direction, wasn't something she met with every day.

  "There we are," said Chalcus, sounding pleased though not triumphant. "Nothing but lichen and a pine wedged in the rock ahead."

  Ilna wondered what the chanteyman would think was worth him feeling triumphant about. It might be that she'd learn before long.

  The headland was a wedge of dense gray sandstone which remained like a doorpost when tides wore away the walls of softer rock to either side. Ilna thankfully followed Merota out of the brush and onto bare stone. Though vertical--even undercut--on the seaward edge, as Ilna had seen from their original landfall, this side of the slab lay at a shallow slope that she could walk up with ease.

  Chalcus already lay at the top with his legs spread, leaning far out into the air. "Come look at this," he called.

  Merota paused at the bottom of the slope. "Ilna," she whispered. "I don't like heights. I really don't...."

  "Yes, all right," Ilna said. She understood the difference between the fear that everyone felt about one thing or another, and the blind, clutching terror that she saw in the child's eyes. "Wait for us here."

  Ilna crawled up the slope on all fours. She could have walked to the chanteyman's side, but since she was going to lie down on the rock anyway she saw no point in doing so. It wasn't as though she had anything to prove to Chalcus; or to anyone in the world if it came to that.

  By looking straight down--not an experience Ilna liked, though it didn't freeze her heart the way it might have Merota's--she could see the stern of a trireme being worked around the rock. The water must be deep, because the vessel was very close inshore.

  "Nobody on the deck," Chalcus observed. "And the water full of those devils."

  The sea was in direct sunlight. The ammonites shimmered and rippled around the vessels like maggots in a rotting corpse.

  The trireme slowly disappeared beneath the overhang, edging forward much as it had when Ilna watched it being launched by pulleys from the shiphouse in Valles. She wondered why the vessel didn't reappear around the other face of the headland. The warships were so long that she should see the prow of the second, and the first should be completely in sight.

  "Now where do you suppose the ships are going, my dear?" Chalcus said, rising to his feet with a nonchalance that Ilna could never have equalled when perched so high above a sheer drop. "Wizards' work, do you think?"

  "I know as little of wizards' work as you do," Ilna said--tartly and perhaps not quite truthfully, if she let herself think about it. "My first guess would be that there's a hole in the cliff, and they're being drawn inside it."

  The chanteyman slapped his left palm with the fingers of his right hand, callus cracking on callus with a sound like sudden lightning. "Yes!" he said. "Now, how shall we get a look at this tunnel, as it may be?"

  He leaned out again; the second ship had disappeared as completely as the first. To Ilna's shock and surprise, Chalcus sheathed his sword and swung himself over the lip of the rock.

  "I can't come with you!" Ilna said. It wasn't that she was afraid--though she certainly had a healthy fear of plunging a distance sure to be fatal--but that she simply didn't have the physical ability to hold herself by her toes and fingertips on a face so sheer. Garric and Cashel gathered eggs when the seabirds nested on the spires of rock off the coast of Haft, but even they would have found this hard sandstone daunting.

  Well, Chalcus probably couldn't weave anything more complex than a rope splice. And she wasn't competing with him!

  "One's enough for the task," Chalcus said. He pitched his voice normally, but Ilna could hear the strain in it. This wasn't a time to bother him. "You just keep an eye on Mistress Merota till I'm back, hey?"

  Ilna looked over her shoulder. She hadn't been thinking about the--

  The girl was gone.

  "Merota!" Ilna said. The child couldn't have been carried off without sound! Unless the wind over the rock was louder than--

  "I'm all right!" Merota called from the bushes just below the bare rock. "Please, I just want some privacy!"

  Oh. Well, I can scarcely blame the poor child. All these days on the ship with fifty men watching everything--

  "Ah!" Chalcus cried. "I've found something indeed!"

  Merota screamed. The brush crackled as though an ox was charging through it. Ilna, flicking her supple noose open in her hands, sprang toward the sound. Bushes and the crowns of saplings quivered as something raced through the thicket, headed away from her.

  Merota's scream stopped as if her throat had been--

  As though someone had clapped a hand over the child's mouth. Laughter, the horrible cackling laughter that they'd heard when the Ravager's skiff landed, filled the sunlit air.

  Ilna shouted over her shoulder, "I'm going after the girl!" as she plunged into the brush. She didn't know if Chalcus heard her or not, but he couldn't possibly get up the cliff soon enough to help.

  Ilna didn't suppose she could do anything useful either, but she had to try. This is my fault....

  If she'd thought about it, Ilna would have expected the thick vegetation to delay her. In fact she slipped between trunks that seemed too close to pass her and around brambles that she barely noticed as she went by. There wasn't time to think or worry; the same instincts that guided her weaving chose Ilna's path now.

  The maniac laughter still drew away from her. Ilna heard splashes, then a final trill
of hideous joy.

  She reached the edge of the bog where woody shrubs gave way to reeds and mud. A door thumped, or perhaps it was a bubble of mephitic vapors bursting on the surface.

  Ilna paused. The bog was astir with ripples and counter-ripples reflected from the stems of the soft-bodied plants. The water showed no tracks, and there was no obvious path across it.

  But there was a path, to the thing that had taken Merota and to Ilna os-Kenset as well. She walked into the bog. Her feet sank ankle deep on the first step, to mid-shin on the second--

  And the third step was onto the top of a stone pillar hidden just beneath the surface of water dark with mud and the black effluvium of rotting vegetation. Ilna strode on, her smile more terrible than a snarl on most faces.

  The rope flowed between her fingers; she caressed the noose the way an old spinster pets her cat. Ilna didn't know what she was going to meet at the end of her trail, but she knew that it, whatever it was, would meet her.

  Walking as though she was in her own kitchen, Ilna wove a winding course among the tussocks. Each support was a long stride from the one nearest and no bigger than was sufficient to hold the ball of a person's foot. She never slipped. The black water gurgled as if in sullen anger to be balked of its prey.

  The mist wrapped her. Occasionally Ilna could see as much as twenty feet in one direction or the other, but more often her hands would have faded from sight if she'd stretched them out.

  Ilna grinned with at least a morsel of humor. She'd been in worse places than this. She wasn't sure that was a recommendation, but it was something.

  A shape loomed ahead of her. At first Ilna thought she was seeing another phantasm of mist, but this held its form despite the surrounding whorls and caracoles of gray. It was an island, and there was a hut near the edge of it.

  She stepped onto firm, dry soil. There was grass, though the blades had the yellowish pallor of vegetation covered almost long enough to kill it completely. What she'd taken for a building was a boulder the size of a building. There was a bronze door let into its face.

  Ilna looked around, not that she'd be able to see much unless it came charging through the fog. She doubted the island was of any great extent, though she couldn't be sure under the present conditions. Bubbles and perhaps frogs plopped; nothing moved but the mist. There was no sign of Merota or whatever it was that had taken the child.

  Ilna gripped the door's bar handle; the bronze was dry and felt distinctly warm. Perhaps she should be pleased not to be touching metal that dripped with the swamp's cold sweat, but it hadn't been what she expected. Ilna doubted that the unexpected was ever a good thing in this place.

  The door swung toward her easily. Ilna hadn't thought it would open. The panel's face was bare of anything but the handle, but she'd still thought there'd be a lock--concealed from any but a wizard, perhaps.

  A staircase cut in living rock curved downward. Ilna grimaced. She didn't like stone, but neither had she come this far in order to turn around again. She started down.

  Ilna was less than a full circuit below the ground when she heard a soft thump and the feeling of air being compressed. The wan light she'd had to that point cut off. The door had closed, perhaps pushed by the faint breeze. Perhaps. She paused for long moments, but there was nothing to hear save her heartbeats echoing through her bloodstream.

  She went on, moving without haste. It wasn't likely that whatever waited below was something she'd want to hurry to meet.

  Light shone into the staircase below. Ilna didn't walk faster, but she frowned slightly. The glow had the balance of sunlight outdoors, not the yellowish quivering of a lamp forty feet below ground.

  With another turn of the stairs she came to the slit carved into the rock. If she'd been in a tower she'd have said it was a window looking out onto a bustling city. Folk shopped in kiosks and lounged in the open square below her. The three-story buildings were made of brick with red tile roofs. The women leaning out of windows to talk with their neighbors were close enough that Ilna could have shouted to them--if her apparent vantage point and the women themselves had been real.

  A troop of armored cavalry rode through the square beneath a banner figured with a crab. People made way for the soldiers sullenly but without exceptional concern.

  Ilna continued downward. Whatever the 'window' showed, it wasn't this island at this time. All the people she'd seen were alive.

  There were more windows--onto fields worked by teams of horses and living humans; onto the sea across which a squadron of warships rowed swiftly; onto a palace courtyard in which a burly man in black armor and a crown harangued a crowd of courtiers and citizens alike.

  Ilna gave them only passing glances. She was interested in reality alone, and they weren't part of her present reality.

  She wasn't sure how far down she went. She hadn't been counting the steps, and anyway she couldn't have counted so far without a tally.

  The door at the bottom of the stairs was wooden and stood ajar. There was no light in the room beyond, but enough of a subdued haze filtered from the slits into time and space above for Ilna's adapted eyes to view the portal clearly.

  She pushed it open with her left hand and stepped inside. When her foot crossed the threshold, the walls themselves lighted to display a circular treasure room.

  Ilna felt her diaphragm suck in. When she was a child she'd had to scramble to earn enough for her and Cashel to live on, but 'enough' was all that had concerned her. After she'd established herself as the finest weaver on the east coast of Haft--and beyond--she'd made a point of being paid what her work was worth, because she would no more let herself be robbed than she would rob another.

  Ilna had never cared about other people's money, though; and because she was without avarice, the concept of wealth beyond avarice was meaningless to her. Even so, she had to gasp at the sheer volume coins and jewels and bracelets, the gleaming platters and vases of silver where they weren't solid gold. The white light, though not harsh, was shadowless because it flooded from all directions at once.

  She gave a throaty chuckle. The stories with which Mastyn and Vonculo had lured the others to mutiny had been true after all; though the chance of any of this wealth reaching the hands of the sailors was as slight as that of Ilna letting treasure turn her from her duty.

  Bags and pots of coins and other small items sat in piles. Some had split and spilled their contents again. Among the riches were objects whose value was less obvious: a small wooden coffin; a device of globes and spindles, made of brass; a clear disk the size of a plate but convex on both sides; and a score of others, all jumbled together with the gold.

  Ilna noticed a rolled tapestry under a stack of plate. She grasped it, intending to pull it out to examine. When her fingers touched the slick weave, she felt a heart-freezing image of waves on all sides towering above houses as people screamed in their final terror.

  Ilna drew her hand back with a grim smile. Her fingers tingled. Fabric had always spoken to her, and it did so with a particular clarity since she returned from Hell. More often than not what her talent told her was unpleasant. Rarely as unpleasant as this, however, feeling thousands die together as an island sank in a foaming sea.

  When Ilna entered the chamber, the door had closed behind her of its own accord. The inside walls were unmarked and as smooth as polished flint, but she could find the door easily enough. There were other doors as well, hidden in the walls.

  One of them opened. A figure all in white stepped in and the portal closed behind him. Him, though he was as sexless as a spindle; and as evil as a spider lurking in a tunnel of white silk.

  "Welcome to Yole, mistress," he said. "I wasn't expecting to find a visitor, but I'm not sorry to see you. I am Ewis of Zampt."

  He made a half-bow; his eyes never left her face. Ewis' pupils were the only parts of his person that weren't white.

  "I'm Ilna os-Kenset," Ilna said. "I've come looking for the child who's in my care. Have you taken her?"
r />   "Me?" said Ewis with a giggle. "Goodness, no, neither I nor any of my colleagues. I suspect the Tall Thing has your little friend. He's eaten recently, so there's no immediate danger."

  Ewis took a faceted ivory bead from his sleeve and tossed it in his palm. "Besides," he added, "it rather likes little children. Not adults, though; and especially not wizards."

  "Fine," Ilna said, though nothing about the situation was really fine. "Where will I find the Tall Thing? Is it a wild beast?"

  "Oh, goodness, goodness!" Ewis laughed. "What shall I say? It's wild enough, and it's beyond question bestial--but a wild beast? I think not."

  He sobered and focused eyes as black as a spider's on Ilna. "And I'm afraid I can't tell you where it is, either. We have to avoid it, you see, my colleagues and I. It's rather angry at us, I'm afraid."

  "If you're avoiding the Tall Thing...," Ilna said. She viewed so much of life and the world with loathing that it was natural now to keep her tone emotionless as she spoke to this creature. "Then you have to know where it is. Tell me."

  "Why, you might be right at that," said Ewis. "Yes, perhaps I should do that. Perhaps I should. But first, won't you look at the treasures my colleagues and I have gathered?"

  He rummaged with his left hand in a tumble of silver salvers and brought out an earthenware bowl. "You could call anyone in the world to you with this," he said. "He would come. Alive or dead, he would come."

  "I want the child Merota," Ilna said. Her fingers were still, but the soft supple noose they held restrained an anger that would otherwise, otherwise.... "That's all I want from you, wizard."

  "Not amused by the Bowl of Longing?" Ewis said, tittering. "Goodness, goodness."

  He set down the bowl and stepped over to the crystal disk Ilna had noticed already. "Perhaps this new acquisition will pique your interest, mistress. It's the Lens of Rushila, and it can show you anything in the cosmos. No wizard can protect himself from the eye of whoever wields this wonder. Is it not fine?"