A Sword for a Dragon (23 page)

There was a sudden red flash in the room that flared forth for a moment before it cooled to a single point of brightness. The killers paused in their work. The people edged back from the killing zone in a terrified keening mass.

Below them, a trio of figures strode out from the yellow light of a doorway to inspect the mud. The three figures were cloaked head to toe in black, but there, all resemblance ceased. The tallest was high priest Odirak. Beside him stood the former bishop of Auros, now nothing but a servant of Odirak’s kept alive at the high priest’s pleasure.

However, it was the other figure that controlled the orb of light that hovered above and behind them. Under the black hood, there burned yellow eyes, a gleam of horn betrayed the beak that had formed over the face of the Mesomaster Gog Zagozt. Compared to this power, the high priest and the bishop were like moths dancing around a lantern.

A man brought a sample of the mud, and Gog Zagozt dipped in a long finger and tasted. It was ripe.

“Taste, and remember. This is the ripeness that is required.”

Odirak tasted. He motioned for the bishop to taste, too. The bishop grimaced but dipped in his finger and trembling, placed it to his lips. Something in his heart rebelled at this horror, he could not lick this stuff.

Gog Zagozt leaned closer. “Taste, fool, I will not be able to come and taste all the time. You will taste and inform me when the mud is ready from now on. You must be able to taste… or someone else will taste, and you will join the rest.”

The bishop licked the mud. It was vile, the blood was thick. He wanted to retch, but dared not. For a fraction of a second, he exchanged glances with Odirak. Odirak was smiling at him, enjoying his discomfort. The bishop had come to regret the day he had first met Odirak.

The Mesomaster spoke words of power. Two more flashes came, and the men below changed gears and set up the molds. Into the molds, they poured the bloody slurry.

The bishop stood beside the Mesomaster trying desperately not to think “wrong” thoughts. The Mesomaster had an uncanny ability to tell what one was thinking.

The molds were filled. The Mesomaster raised both hands and summoned the energies of death that were available. A great red flash erupted in the air with a clap of small thunder, and then came another and another and with each one, a mold jerked while within flashed a dull red light.

At length, all the molds had received invigoration. The Mesomaster turned and walked away. Odirak followed, as did the bishop, who felt a terrible bleakness descending onto his soul. Now he had seen the process by which the new weapon was being forged. Now he would have to live with his conscience for the rest of his life.

The screams of the people resounded in a constant roaring screech as the killers went back to work. The bishop breathed an audible sigh of relief when the door finally swung shut behind them and cut off the sound.

The dark cowl swung his way, the yellow eyes gleamed in the darkness beneath them.

“You tremble at the sounds of death, Priest?”

The bishop hesitated. “I am not used to it,” he stammered.

The thing laughed, a strange creaking sound like horns rubbing together.

“Without trolls, your armies cannot stand against the Argonathi. The Argonathi might attempt a further invasion. We will stop that by destroying their expeditionary force. We cannot get trolls in time, they are in short supply and difficult to breed.”

He knew this. Ten cows died in agony for every one that managed to give birth to a troll.

“So we must do this instead,” said the bishop.

“Right!” said the Mesomaster striding away.

The bishop felt the hot eyes of Odirak on him.

“You seek to curry favor with the great one?”

“I? No, not at all, master.”

“See to it that you keep your mouth shut in the future!” Odirak strode off, and the bishop hurried to keep up.

As the spell progressed, Ribela fell into the deep-trance state. Her lips and tongue moved, part of her mind continued to recite the words, but her consciousness detached from her body and hovered, momentarily floating in the room in Merchant Irhan’s house on the world Ryetelth. Detachment was complete, she completed the declension, her lips crackling under the pressure of key volumes. Abruptly the astral image imploded and vanished into a point. No longer did it hover over the world Ryetelth, but now roved through the sea of chaos, which lay beneath all the bright bubbles of the worlds that gave texture to the Mother’s hand.

In the general grey backwash that swirled endlessly here, there were vortexes and waves ripping back and forth through the ether. Where they clashed, dark patterns erupted and sounds of heavy electric static clicked and clattered.

This realm was familiar to the Queen of Mice. This was where she had done much of her life’s work.

A Thingweight appeared nearby, drawn toward the presence it sensed. To her astral presence, the monster was a small thing, a cloud of shivering silver particles, tentacles pulsating, about the size of a large dog. Blue energies sparked beneath it.

Its tentacles thrust actively through the ether in her direction. They touched nothing, however, for her presence was purely on the astral plane. She was vast, diffuse, capable of instant motion. No Thingweight could harm her.

The mind of the Thingweight was limited, but it knew there was something here. It retracted many tentacles into itself and damped down its energies and prepared to wait. Like a polar bear at a seal’s breathing hole, the Thingweight reasoned that sooner or later whatever it was that lurked within the ether would have to emerge. Then it could be seized and devoured.

Ribela ignored it and turned to set her bearings. Another one was coming. They might fight, perhaps even destroy each other. It happened sometimes.

She drove her astral presence forward, penetrating the ether of chaos like a whale sliding through an ocean of mist. She surfed vast combers of static particles and skipped across the mouths of whirling vortices. Briefly she flung through a belt of masses. Whirling shapes tumbled past her, even through her, but they were physical things and she was not. Among the masses were packs of predator clouds, things the size of tennis balls, riding on flickering yellow energies. These things swarmed about her, thrusting tentacles through her presence, but they found nothing to touch.

She went on, leaving the tumbling masses behind. On this scale, she traversed a vast distance, hundreds of thousands of miles through vast vortices and tumbling chaos.

Far ahead she detected something, a trace of presence, an intimation of gravity around some great dread thing, that lay across chaos like a string pulled from its own dark, energetic world and twisted across chaos to extrude into the world of Ryetelth.

This, then, was the thing that sat in Dzu, the reborn god, dread Sephis.

Ribela swung in toward it, as if she were a moth drawn irresistibly to its flame. She probed carefully.

What was this being that was contorted through the worlds like this? How did it avoid the Thingweights and other predators here?

There were many hellish worlds in the substance of the Mother’s hand. Ribela knew that this monster might have come from any one of dozens, but knowing just what it was, was of enormous importance. The magic to destroy it would be impossible without a knowledge of its identity.

Closer now, Ribela caught wisps of the thought of the thing. A powerful mind, preoccupied with feeding, which it did on the death energies offered up from endless sacrifices. It blazed on the chaotic mental plane like a nova in a star field.

Slowly she drew closer and was able to visualize the thing, which stood like a vast column of clouds through the stuttering stuff of chaos.

The energies within it were enormous. The world it came from was one where metals ran like liquid under a searing hot atmosphere so dense it would crush anything not made of metals and crystals.

She had it then, it was a gammadion, a demon from a hot world. Ribela knew enough now to understand the magnitude of the task before them. She was awed at the ability of the Masters to even communicate with one of these terrifying beings. Certainly her own efforts to penetrate to those worlds had met with scant success. The minds there were too hard and harsh for much contact with outsiders. They grew like crystals themselves, along straight lines, resistant to change.

How, by the sweat of the Mother’s brow, had they managed to negotiate with this monster?

She whirled past, orbiting the thing like a comet around a star and began to surge away, back toward her entry point in the subworld.

She was preoccupied for a moment. These things, called gammadions were generally proof against any magic known to the Sisterhood of the Isles. For dealing with such things, the sisters had always besought the higher realms for help. From the Nudar and the Sinni had come assistance against the Abyssions of the Masters in the first war. When Mach Ingbok attempted translation of his flesh to steel, the Nudar interfered and prevented his success.

The memory brought more fond thoughts of the gentle Sinni. The Sinni had given generously of their selves for hundreds of years. Truly there was a higher race!

The thing that had been the god Sephis in its earlier rule in ancient Ourdh had been of a class of demons called Malacostraca, a suborder among the Gammadions. With the aid of the Sinni, that thing had been thrown down, and its hellish rule expunged.

Was this another of the same kind?

This gave Ribela hope, for she could summon the Sinni to her aid, and she knew much of the lore for the disintegration of such demons. It had been done at least once before.

And then she felt the tug upon her. It came as an exquisite shock. Somehow she had been detected, even though she was barely an evanescence. Worse, a contact had been established, which meant that this was no Thingweight but some higher order of intelligence.

Quickly she sought to cut the contact. Wire thin, it broke and was reformed in a moment. Again she cut it and again it reformed.

She glimpsed a flicker of black flame and knew at once that there was another enemy present, but undetected by her. It was a great power, a terrible intelligence.

A projection of some kind, black and octopoid, was growing in the ether beside her. With sudden desperation, she composed a swift disabling spell and flung it at the thing.

A red flash exploded across the grey shifting substance of chaos. The thing was forcibly compressed to the size of a bounce ball, but it was not flung away. It held on grimly.

Ribela raced toward her entry point. She could shed the thing by returning to her body.

As she accelerated, she continued to clamp down on the thing, compressing it to a ball, but it was hellishly strong and resistant.

Then she began to weaken. Her psychic strength was ebbing and with it her ability to keep the octopoid compressed. Something was very wrong. The mice were tiring. They had not been fed. Ribela could not imagine that Lagdalen would have failed her willingly.

A sick desperation overcame her. If the mice halted then she would have only her own strength, and she might not be able to keep the black octopoid destroyer compressed. A dismal picture formed in her mind. She would be trapped by this thing and delivered up to the monster itself.

She passed a pair of Thingweights fighting, a writhing mass of tentacles, fragments were floating off the combatants and their energies had shifted down spectrum to a deep orange.

She was there at last. Exhaustion was approaching. She returned to the world Ryetelth and hovered once more above her physical presence in the room at the top of the house of the Merchant Irhan.

Lagdalen was gone. The mice roamed aimlessly around the floor, weak and starving. The bowl of oil-soaked bread was on a table too high for them to reach.

She had to return, the black octopoid was regaining full size. Tentacles were clutching around her. With a final effort, she sank into her body. To her horror, she found the enemy’s spell clung to her. Still the tentacles clutched hold. She was undone, the thing had reached through her because the protections of her spell were too weak.

Now it began to strangle her. She fought to breathe, struggling to work her lungs. Where was Lagdalen? What had happened?

Her resources were getting very low. The black octopoid was thick upon her. Her breath was dying in her throat.

Captain Hollein Kesepton rode through the streets of Ourdh with his thoughts in a whirl. Impelled by the desperate need to see Lagdalen, he fairly cantered across the Zoda, past the gibbets where hung the rotting remains of petty criminals.

The questions revolved in his brain. Was she well? How was the baby? Why was she here at all? These questions had been going around and around in his head for days, ever since he had heard that she had been sent to Ourdh on a mission for the Office of Insight. It seemed incredible that the Lady Lessis would ask this of her. Hollein knew that duty was taken seriously by the upper classes, but with their baby just a few months old, surely Lagdalen could have been spared. She was barely eighteen and had already seen more than her share of dangers.

But then everything about this situation seemed crazy. The city, the war, the land of Ourdh, it was hard to know what was what. There had been a decidedly chilly reception for him at the palace. The palace officials had kept him waiting for hours before finally informing him that the emperor was as yet unwilling to allow the Argonathi inside the city walls. Kesepton was told to return within three hours for a definitive reply.

Why was the emperor behaving like this to the Argonathi legions who had rescued the day at Salpalangum? What did he expect them to do, fight the Sephisti alone?

He grimaced and spat as the stink of the gibbets wafted to him. There were things about Ourdh that any free man had to hate. The rulers here seemed to care little about earning the love and gratitude of the people. The fedd were beaten down.