A Guile of Dragons (20 page)

“The poisoned are simple enough,” Earno explained. “A purge will clear them of venom, at least enough to keep them from dying. They can recover from the rest, given time.”

“And they take a long time to die, in any case,” Tyr remarked. “I have seen enough of it this fall. The skin and muscles contract, until they can neither move nor breathe. Then the joints snap and they are torn to shreds by their own bones. It is terrible to think that we might have saved our Rangan traders, and many of the Other Ilk as well, by simply . . . well, sticking a finger down their throats. . . .”

Most of the poisoned dwarves had been dosed and given into the care of their families. This was too dangerous a method with the spellbound, though: it was impossible to know what commands had been laid upon them until the spell was loosed. Also, the spellbound could pass their compulsion to others like a plague, by means of the dragonlight lingering in their eyes. They were kept in the Healing Chambers—along with those who tended them.

The summoner and the Eldest arrived at the first patient.

“Ah, Vendas,” Tyr said. “I knew his father well. Has he improved, do you think?”

Earno inspected the dwarf's stiff motionless face, the eyes clenched shut like fists. “No,” he finally answered the Eldest. “He hasn't. I am concerned about this dwarf. A command may have been laid upon him. He was a hunter?”

“Yes, one of the few males. His companions were all slain; he alone was left alive and unwounded.”

“He should be separated from these others and a guard placed on him, one who knows the dangers.”

“Very well.”

The next patient was Deor.

“That herbal goo of yours,” he told Earno, “gave me really foul dreams.”

Earno smiled tentatively. “No,” he replied, “it merely released them. And I'm glad to hear it.” He passed a mirror before the young dwarf's eyes, watching his reaction, and nodded. “You are dismissed, Deor syr Theorn; the spell is loosed.”

“I never felt spellbound, you know. Just a little strange.”

“There was no command laid upon you. I guess you looked into a dragon's eyes last night, when they struck at the workers around Southgate-ruin.”

“Well, I did. Just for a moment.”

“Last night you wouldn't admit it.”

“Wouldn't I?” Deor looked surprised, then disturbed. “That's true!”

“Don't worry. There never was any real danger. A spell unfocused by a command simply fades with time. But until it has faded it makes one liable to suggestion.”

“Eh. That was how you got me to drink that stuff.”

Tyr laughed. They were about to move on when Deor said, “Is there any news about Morlock?”

“No,” said Tyr.

“Ah, well. He can have only just reached Haukrull by now.”

After the rest of the victims were examined, and most of them released, Earno walked with Tyr to his chambers to have breakfast.

“It is a good thing you were here,” Tyr told him. “Our dragonlore is out of date, and much of it has been lost. Even in my youth it was considered a useless and somewhat morbid study. No one of us would have recognized the threat of spells.”

Earno didn't wish to say how the idea had come to him. So he said, “I thought some still studied the subject for its own interest.”

“There are always antiquarians. I sent a few to you yesterday, when I heard what you were doing. I hope they didn't get in the way.”

“They were helpful. Without them I would never have known an infusion of maijarra leaves could loose the spell.”

“Helpful, were they? Frankly, I'm surprised. I spent half the night, or maybe it just seemed that long, arguing with one of them. He had a notion that dragons were actually extinct. That was . . . before. You understand. Now he insists that the dragons we face today are a different breed than those we fought ages past in the Longest War.”

“Um. Interesting.”

“But useless. The definition of an antiquarian.”

Earno shook his head. “They say you are an antiquarian yourself, Eldest Tyr.”

“They just mean I'm old. But I'm not useless, not yet.”

They arrived at the corridor leading to the Eldest's chambers. Tyr pulled open a door and waved Earno in. “Just wait in here a moment, until I've seen about breakfast. It'll be nothing fancy, mind you. The feasts are over for Thrymhaiam, for a season.” Then he left.

In the room where Earno found himself there were workbenches, where restless dwarves could work with their hands while they waited to see the Eldest. This amused Earno (he would have preferred a pitcher of warm water, a basin, and a dish of soap), but he recognized the compliment it implied. He wondered if Tyr actually expected him to while away the time by polishing a few stones he might (but did not) have in his pocket, or by cutting glass for mirrors.

This last bench drew his eye, though. He went to it and found a few scraps of mirror. He raised one and looked into his own eyes.

Yes. The flash of deep bright red was still there. He had hoped it would be gone by now. He was sure, he was almost sure, that the dragonspell had not been focused by a command. Perhaps looking into the eyes of so many spellbound had reinforced his own spell. It was unfortunate.

Perhaps he should take some of the maijarra infusion. But maijarra trees were rare in these parts. (The tree had been extinct on Thrymhaiam for centuries, although, ironically, it was extremely common in Haukrull, beyond the Haukr mountains, where the dragons now reigned.) He, as a summoner, had many other ways of countering the spell. Best to leave the herbs for those who had none.

He was uneasily aware of the danger, that his reluctance to take this most direct step toward lifting the spell might be an effect of the spell itself. But he also knew that, for the moment, he himself was in control and that the spell would only grow weaker in time, since it had not, could not have been fixed by a command. His wild suspicions and fears seemed to have passed with Morlock into the darkness under the mountains. For now, the danger was no danger. He heard Tyr approaching and hastily put the mirror fragment down.

Morlock lay in the dark among the ruined timbers of a burned building. A few stray fumes floated upward in the darkness, until they were brilliantly lanced by the crossed light of the major moons. But it wasn't the building smoldering; it was him.

He tried to remember things but could not. Had he delivered the challenge? He remembered the sound of his own voice screaming hatred or defiance, then the rush of flames that swept him off his feet. . . . Had that been Saijok Mahr? Or Vild Kharum? Then he had to ask himself: who is Vild Kharum?

The master of the guile, he answered himself immediately. It seemed as if he had known this for a long while, but he couldn't remember when he had learned it. He had not known the name that morning (which morning?) when he stepped into the light and Haukrull vale. He remembered walking slowly up the valley . . . after that it became confused. He didn't want to remember. There was something horrible in those events, something he refused to remember.

He clenched his teeth and retook the journey step by step.

At first it was as if nothing had changed in the valley. He saw scattered maijarra trees in bloom. There were blackirons and brightirons, the ashen glow of the brightirons radiant amid the unpolished ebony of their darker cousins. There was even a line of rare coppers, crookedly following a vein of ore, their leaves alive with unearthly colors in the autumnal light.

“Maijarra are weeds,” the Eldest Tyr had told him long ago, “and enough of them can ruin a mountain, plowing through the underpinnings for veins of metal.”

“They're pretty weeds, though,” Morlock had remarked, to which the Eldest responded with an incredulous grunt.

There was a maijarra forest along the northern edge of Haukrull vale where the Eldest's statement was proved literally true: maijarra roots had dug into the fabric of the range and collapsed an entire mountain. The Other Ilk in Haukrull were always taking up a campaign to exterminate the maijarra in Haukrull, as the Seven Clans long ago had done on Thrymhaiam. They had not advanced very far, however. A mature maijarra is very difficult to kill.

Topping a rise, Morlock saw for the first time evidence of the dragons in Haukrull. In the deep depression between two outflung arms of Mount Gramer he saw a long, torn, burned space, dead black against the dying gold of the grass. He advanced cautiously down the slope, but he was sure the ruin had been wreaked some time ago: there was no smoke, no flower of steam opening in the air, no feeling of heat from the jagged black earthen scar as he approached it.

Before he had reached it (it sprawled unavoidable across his northward path) he saw more signs of the dragons. A hole had been blown out of Gramer's side, so that the two arms of the mountain formed a sort of sunken road leading to this door. And it
was
a door: great slabs of stone formed the threshold, doorposts, and lintel. The door was large enough to admit a giant—or a dragon. He had to think of Saijok Mahr, dwelling in the depths of the Runhaiar, and he guessed this was the entrance to his den. He would have gone no nearer, but he saw there was writing on the doorposts.

He went halfheartedly, reluctantly, expecting at any moment the appearance of Saijok's flaming wolflike head in the dark doorway. The air flowing from it carried a poisonous stench. But it was cool; the poison had been exhaled long ago. There was no dragon near, or so he guessed. Holding an edge of his cape over his mouth to screen out the poison, he went forward.

The left-hand doorpost was covered with carven words and crudely executed reliefs. The right-hand post bore nothing but a crooked line of runic letters, too far up for Morlock to be able to distinguish them. But much of the writing on the other post Morlock found to be readable. The lettering was Dwarvish, and so, too, was much of the language, though of a strange and archaic kind. The script was thick with non-Dwarvish words, also. Some of these he recognized; others he did not. There was the word
kharum
, for instance: the Anhikh word for “ruler of a city” or “king.” Yet it always appeared, in the inscriptions, beside another word,
vild
, which Morlock did not recognize.

In the bright empty morning, he stood before the written stone and read it through. The inscription told of a battle between Saijok Mahr and this
vild kharum
who, from the reliefs, was also a dragon. The battle had been interrupted, according to the reliefs, by a horde of batlike creatures. Although the inscription at this point became unreadable, Morlock guessed that the bats represented lesser dragons, allies or servants of the
vild kharum.
In contrast, the blankness of the right-hand stone now seemed more than a little ominous—as if it represented a yet-unwritten revenge against the
vild kharum
and its allies.

He was disturbed that these creatures, who clearly hated each other as much as or more than they hated the rest of the world, should use a language so clearly akin to that of his own people. Perhaps they had stolen it: clearly they were all born thieves and marauders, taking what they were unable to make. This could be true for words, he supposed, as well as anything made from silver or gold. Perhaps it could.

He turned back to the inscription for a moment. Studying the runes, he found them crookedly carved. The reliefs were indeed coarsely imagined and poorly executed. But he was convinced that the work had been done by tools held in hands: he could see the marks where a hammer had missed its stroke, where a chisel had gone astray. The tools might have been obtained in Haukrull, but he did not think any of the Other Ilk had done the carving; it was too inept and outlandish. He thought of the manlike beast that drifted dead in the dragon's pool. But how had such an outlandish creature come into the Wardlands? Astride a dragon's back?

Buried in thought he climbed the long hill before him. Before he reached its height he heard a loud roar and the rasp of wings on the air. A shadow fell between him and the sun.