Servant of the Dragon Read online

  The wizard in white dropped her dagger and stumbled away. Purlio shouted a word of power in a terrible voice. He lifted the marcasite fossil against his face.

  There was a flash of red as deep as sunset on a dying world. The shell--the Great One--merged with Purlio's flesh to rest on his shoulders in place of his skull. Hazy tentacles wobbled from the opening just as fleshy ones had done in life.

  Soldiers threw down their weapons and scrambled away. Attaper shouted, "Forward! Forward!" and banged his sword hilt on the alabaster, but even he was blind with horror at what he'd seen.

  The fleeing wizard turned and looked at her former leader. She started to scream. The Great One's arms wrapped her head and drew her against the parrot-like beak. Bone crunched repeatedly before the screaming stopped.

  Garric jumped against the screen, this time hitting with both feet. A section the size of a palace door toppled inward, shattering into a thousand creamy fragments.

  Purlio turned, staring at Garric through the ammonite's eyes. Its pupils were curved slits. The dead wizard lay on her back; her face had been chewed away. The Great One's tentacles were now blood-red muscle.

  Garric swung his sword in a slanting arc. Purlio became a sparkle of scarlet light. It swirled and vanished as the bright steel snicked through it.

  The air was empty.

  Tenoctris stirred on the stone couch like a sparrow awakening. Garric slumped to his knees. He let the sword slip from his nerveless fingers and clutched the bier for support.

  "By the Lady!" cried a soldier outside on the roof. "There's armies coming across all those bridges! By the Lady! there's a million soldiers coming at us and they're all dead!"

  "Behold the Palace of Landure, sheep-boy," said the ring demon. In a half-wondering tone he added, "We've arrived. I really didn't think we would."

  "It wasn't so bad," Cashel said truthfully. "With you to help me, I mean."

  The structure was set into--cut into--the face of a bluff like the one which had opened every stage of Cashel's journey through the Underworld. In front was a porch with four stone pillars carved to look like palm trees. The bases were one color, the uplifted fronds forming the capital another, and the shafts were painted in contrasting stripes--though Cashel couldn't guess what any of the colors would've been under a real sun.

  The blue light here was cold. It made the building look like a tomb.

  Instead of a wooden or metal panel, a curtain of silver beads fell across the doorway. They shimmered as the slight breeze stirred them. Cashel couldn't read the pattern of their motions, but he knew there was one.

  "I guess I'll go on in," Cashel said. "Unless there's something else I ought to do, Master Krias?"

  "Nothing at all, sheep-boy," the ring said. "All you have to do is go inside and place the wafer where I tell you; then you're done. You're free."

  "Right," said Cashel, striding toward the porch. There was more in the demon's voice than the words themselves, but Cashel couldn't figure out what. Life would be a lot simpler if people just said what they meant; but generally they didn't, and he'd learned a long time ago that it didn't help if he asked them slap out what they really wanted.

  Sheep would likely be just as bad if they could talk. Thankfully, they couldn't.

  As he pushed the curtain aside with his outstretched left hand, Cashel heard a chord from the distance behind him mingle with the silver beads' tinkling. Elfin was out there somewhere still. Cashel grimaced, though Elfin's problems weren't Cashel's doing; or at least not much.

  White light from no visible source flooded the long, shallow room beyond the curtain. Cashel touched his quarterstaff to the floor to see which way the shadow fell. There wasn't a shadow, from the hickory or from his own body either.

  The ceiling was high by peasant standards, but not exceptional for the palaces Cashel had seen since he left home; he could've touched it with his staff if he'd wanted to. He couldn't tell how far it stretched to right and left, though. If not forever, then certainly beyond the range of Cashel's own keen eyesight. The inner wall was painted with a mural of Landure in an endless series of occupations.

  "Turn right," Krias said sourly. "It isn't far."

  "Wow," said Cashel as he walked slowly down the passageway. When he looked closer, he saw there wasn't a lot of variety in what Landure was doing, though the settings changed. The wizard's sword struck down a winged creature that would've been a bat if it hadn't been bigger than a plow ox; the wizard held out his clenched fist so his sapphire ring could incinerate men the size of voles who swarmed out of rocky soil; the wizard stood on a beach, driving shark-headed creatures back into the sea; the wizard--

  "Didn't Landure do anything but fight, Master Krias?" Cashel asked.

  "Once he died, sheep-boy," the demon said. "As I recall, you were present when it happened."

  They'd come to a scene of Landure seated on a throne of light. The artist had made Landure's grim expression look regal rather than merely peevish. Before him, bowing so deeply they rubbed their foreheads on the ground, were the front rows of an assembly stretching widely to right and left.

  The assembly was of monsters: half-men and non-men, slender folk Cashel recognized as the People who'd have devoured him, creatures with insect antennae and faceted insect eyes, giants and dwarfs and all manner of differing unpleasantness. Those disappearing into the distance on either side were still shown precisely. Cashel was sure that he could have told their expressions apart if he had a magnifying crystal to examine the painting with.

  Landure's image glared outward, making Cashel a member of the obsequious crowd. Cashel's right hand squeezed his staff a little tighter.

  Cashel was generally pretty easy going--he was too big and strong to be anything else if he was going to live around decent people. Even as a painting, though, Landure sure knew how to get his back up.

  "Well, what're you waiting for, sheep-boy?" Krias demanded shrilly. "You said you wanted to be free, didn't you? Put the life under Landure's tongue in the picture and your job's done!"

  "Ah," said Cashel. People were always and forever getting mad because Cashel hadn't known to do things they hadn't bothered to tell him in a way he understood. That was mostly because they were impatient, he supposed; or because they were just folks who liked to get mad.

  He reached into his wallet, rummaging past the plum-sized fruit he'd brought from the tree, and brought out the crystal wafer. It gleamed like a rainbow in the hall's shadowless illumination.

  Cashel looked at his ring; Krias was barely a spark in the heart of the purple sapphire. He raised the wafer to the mouth of the painted Landure and found it slipped easily into--

  What was no longer a wall, but rather the man himself stepping forward imperiously to snarl, "Who are you and what are you doing here?"

  Cashel stepped back. The painted throne was empty. "I'm Cashel or-Kenset--" he said.

  "He's the fellow returning the life you lost, master," Krias said. "Or hadn't you noticed?"

  "Silence!" the wizard said. "I see I could die of old age if I waited for a peasant to tell me what I need to know."

  Symbols and words were set into the mosaic floor already. Landure undid his shoulder cape's gold clasp--it was fashioned to look like a leech humping toward his throat--and knelt. "Sukk kala bowe," he muttered, using the pin as a wand. "Badawa balaha war-ry."

  Cashel stood silently with the staff vertical at his side. His skin prickled; it always did around wizardry. For choice he'd have planted the staff square in front of him, but he guessed that'd look hostile.

  He felt hostile, that was no lie. Landure the Guardian wasn't wearing any better the second time than he had the first, but there wasn't any help for that.

  "Risauda!" the wizard cried as he struck his pin at the center of the mosaic pentacle before him. Lights whirled in the air. Sometimes Cashel thought he saw figures, but it was all spinning too fast for him to focus.

  Landure stood up. For a moment he seemed a little shaky f
rom the incantation, but he was too mad for that to delay him long. "So, peasant, you killed me!"

  "Yes sir, I did," Cashel said. He didn't raise his voice, he didn't try to explain what the wizard must already know; and especially, he didn't flinch away from Landure's angry gaze.

  Landure didn't flinch either, but his tone was a bit more reasonable when he continued, "I see you brought my ring back. Where's my sword?"

  Cashel twisted the ring one way, then the other, and drew it over his knuckle. The gold circuit was as tight on his little finger as you could have and be comfortable.

  "Here's Krias," he said, handing the ring to the wizard. "He's been a big help to me. As for your sword, I left it where it lay. I don't have anything to do with swords."

  "Except occasionally to kill fools who try to use them on him," piped the ring demon. "Fools whose faithful servant has tried to warn them."

  Landure gave the ring a fierce look as he slipped it onto the middle finger of his left hand. With it in place his gaze returned to Cashel.

  "I suppose you know what you've done?" the wizard said. He pinned his cape back in place. "Besides letting Colva loose, I mean? There's a flood of demon-souls entering the waking world to animate the armies a necromancer is raising!"

  "I didn't know that," Cashel said calmly. He was taller than Landure, stronger than three Landures put together--

  And if it came to that, he'd killed Landure once. The wizard was mad and sure, he had reason to be; but he wasn't going to back Cashel down, no matter what he said or tried.

  "The souls would be entering the waking world anyway," Krias said. "The necromancers are using the Dragon's body as a talisman."

  "I could have stopped--" Landure said.

  "You could have stood against the Dragon, master?" shrilled the ring demon. "You, who couldn't keep a peasant from knocking your fool head in? My, you've come back to life as Landure the Court Jester, I see!"

  The wizard's face went red. For a moment Cashel thought he was going to shout a curse--a real curse, not the sort of thing you said when a skittish ox trod on your foot during yoking.

  Instead, Landure took a deep breath and settled back. "I could have driven some of them back," he said softly, "but there's no point in talking about that now. There's much to be done, and I'll need my sword to do it."

  "Tell him why you came to him, sheep-boy!" Krias said. "Or do you just want to waste your trip?"

  "What?" said Landure. A touch of the usual choler was back in his voice.

  "I'm looking for my friend Sharina," Cashel said, feeling his face get warm. "Tenoctris said that you might be able to help me. She said finding Sharina is maybe important. I mean, not just for me."

  Landure frowned. "Tenoctris of Guelf?" he said. "I've heard of her, but I don't see what...."

  He shrugged. "Anyway," he said, "I don't have time. You can come with me to the surface and I'll send you home from there."

  "He doesn't want to go to the surface," Krias said unexpectedly. "He wants to go to the Chasm and cross it to where the girl is."

  "He can't cross the Chasm!" Landure said. He held his hand out as he spoke to the ring.

  "He can with help, as you--"

  "Demon, shall I lock you in a cliff of basalt that will stand till time stops?" the wizard shouted. "This fool of a peasant killed me and loosed monsters on his own world!"

  "You died not because this man didn't listen," said the ring demon, "but because you didn't explain. And you live now, master, because this man made a journey that not one in a thousand would even have attempted!"

  "Look," Cashel said with dry lips. "If you'll point me to this Chasm, Master Krias, I'll take care of the rest myself. I don't need help from folks who're too busy to give it."

  Landure bunched his ring hand into a fist. "I don't need lectures on duty from servants!" he said. "Or from a peasant either!"

  "You need them from somebody," Krias said. "And as for servants--I've stopped serving you, Landure the Guardian. Now that I've seen how a man behaves, I'm going to do the same from now on. Even if you boil me in amber, the way you threatened before!"

  Landure blinked. He cocked his head like he was hearing voices that Cashel couldn't. The anger went out of him and he slid the ring from his finger.

  "Here," he said, handing it to Cashel. "I owe you this for returning me to life. The demon Krias will guide and protect you, wherever your way may lead."

  Cashel worked the ring onto his finger again. It felt good. Landure glared at the sapphire and added, "Krias knows he'll suffer the consequences if he fails you."

  "I'm not afraid of your consequences!" Krias said. Cashel didn't believe Krias, exactly; but he did take him for a fellow who'd do what he'd said even though it flat terrified him. "As for helping Master Cashel, why, that'll be a pleasure. You can't imagine what a change it is, Landure, to be the companion of a real man."

  Krias snickered. "Of course, he's a really stupid man as well," he added, "but that's all right."

  Cashel laughed. He said to the fuming wizard, "I was afraid something'd happened to the Krias I knew, but now I see it's still him."

  He rapped his staff on the floor to close the previous discussion. "Master Krias?" he said formally. "Where do we go now?"

  Landure himself pointed down the hall in the direction they'd been travelling. "You'll find it fifty yards that way," the wizard said. He correctly read the doubt in Cashel's expression and added, "Let's say the height of a tall tree, if that helps you more."

  "I'll tell you when we get there, sheep-boy," the demon said. "Just start walking."

  Cashel bowed to Landure and walked away. The wizard was frowning. Not with anger this time, but apparently out of puzzlement.

  Cashel grinned. He supposed he and Krias made a pretty funny pair at that. The grin faded as he wondered how Sharina would take to the little fellow. Still, most everybody got along with Sharina.

  The scenes painted on the wall were more of the same: Landure laying down the law, which mostly meant Landure driving all manner of monsters where he wanted them, and slaughtering them if they didn't move fast enough to please him.

  Cashel frowned, but he knew there were folk you pretty well had to treat that way. The People, if it came to that. Being polite to them hadn't got Cashel anything more than the chance to be the main dish at dinner....

  "I guess I see how your Landure gets, ah, short tempered," Cashel said to the ring.

  "Huh!" Krias snapped. "Landure got short tempered by being born. If you listen to him tell it, he's a martyr sacrificing himself to guard the waking world--but the truth is, he made this job for himself so he'd have a chance to behave the way he was going to behave anyhow."

  In a different voice the demon said, "Stop here! You're going to go right past it. Are you blind?"

  Cashel stopped before a panel showing a landscape. Landure wasn't in the picture nor was anybody else Cashel could see, but given the enormous scale there might be whole regiments of people hidden among the trees.

  Ragged cliffs faced a misty chasm. In the middle ground, Flat-topped peaks lifted above the swirls. There was maybe even a far wall of cliffs, but that wasn't anything Cashel could've sworn to.

  A rainbow crossed the gorge. When Cashel turned his head a little to one side or the other, the band of light seemed to shift too.

  "Well, walk into it!" Krias said. "Just step forward! Or is that too complicated for you?"

  "No, Master Krias," Cashel said. Smiling faintly--he didn't know that he'd ever warm to the demon, exactly, but at least you didn't have to worry about the little fellow saying things behind your back that he wouldn't say to your face--Cashel stepped forward.

  There wasn't a wall. It was pretty much like Cashel had walked from meadow into the woods fringing it, though these trees were huge. They were firs and hemlocks, and they didn't start to have branches before you were higher up the trunk than the tops of most trees Cashel had seen.

  He gave his staff a trial spin. In front
of him, then over his head; and for a climax he used the hickory as a spinning brace and whirled his body around in a circle beneath it.

  "Very cute, sheep-boy," said the ring demon sourly. "Do you think you're going to leap the Chasm, then?"

  "No, Master Krias," Cashel said as he walked through the aisles of trees. "But I don't want to be stiff if I have to climb down the cliff, either. How deep is your Chasm, then?"

  Krias sniffed. "Deeper than you'd live to reach the bottom of," he said, "even if you jumped off the edge. Which I don't recommend, sheep-boy; and anyhow, there's a bridge."

  Cashel walked on quietly for a moment. He could see the cliffs past the last of the trees. A wedge of stone jutted out into the clouds like a ship's prow. There wasn't anything that looked like a bridge to him, that was for sure.

  "How do I find the bridge, Master Krias?" Cashel asked. He walked onto the spit of rock and looked over the waste of boiling cloud. The air sparkled with life and moisture, the way it did in the pause between the halves of a fierce storm.

  "You just call it to you, sheep-boy," the ring said. "But before you do that, you should know that there's a guard, and even you can't fight him."

  Cashel cocked an eyebrow, though he didn't say anything.

  Krias tittered nervously. "Oh, I don't doubt that you'd try," he said, "but you can't win unless you first cease to be human. Are you willing to do that, Cashel or-Kenset?"

  Cashel frowned. 'Being human' wasn't one of those things he thought about; it was just what he was. But if he stopped being what he was, he might as well be dead.

  "No, Master Krias," Cashel said. "I guess I'll fight him the way I am now. If that's not enough, well, it wasn't enough."

  He gave his quarterstaff a series of slow twirls to make sure that everything still worked. Cashel knew he could lose a fight--but he hadn't yet, not since he was a boy too young to talk in sentences.

  "I can fight him," Krias said. The demon's voice was all sparks and prickles; much more was going on in Krias' mind that he meant to put into words. "I can fight him, but you'd have to free me."