A Sword for a Dragon (47 page)

Rokensak sidled over and stabbed Peek in the back and repeated the blow twice more before the captain succumbed and fell to the floor.

“Alright, draw your weapons, we go out fighting,” muttered Rokensak, who had gone quite pale.

They pulled open the door and lunged out. Shipmate Doon had no time to react before they were on her. Rokensak’s sword cut her down. Next they ran lightly across the steps to the steering deck where they killed the steersman and took the second mate hostage.

In the waist of the ship, the “wounded” men now rose up as one and attacked the sailors. Surprise worked to their advantage. This sort of treachery the hard-bitten sailing crew of the
Nutbrown
had never imagined.

The fight raged for a few minutes until those on deck had been killed, disabled, or forced to dive overboard. The wounded men had slammed tight the hatches, locking the rest of the crew inside the ship. Then they raised the mainsail, loosed the anchor, turned the
Nutbrown
, and sailed her away from the doomed city of Ourdh.

They found the emperor red-eyed, too worn to weep anymore. He was disheveled and his bed was a mess. There were pillows and blankets scattered all around, where they’d been thrown in fits of rage.

Poor emperor, he was weak and the dreams were more than he could stand. The thing spoke to him. It was as if it were in the same room with him, it was so real, so horrifyingly real. It wanted him. It wanted his love. It wanted his soul. It was so confident that it was going to win. Poor little emperor, he was dying and no one would help him. The priests were useless, they said, “Be rational unto thy situation, Auros commands thee.”

“Be rational?” he screamed at them. “How can I be rational? There is a god of death alive in a pit beneath the city of Dzu, and it intends to have me as its servant. How can I be rational about that, especially since it has now destroyed my armies and conquered my walls.”

The priests of Auros looked back at him with sad cowlike eyes. In truth, they too were lost. They had no answers and all had come to doubt even the existence of Auros.

The monstekirs of the court were even less useful. They had all fled the city long ago. That was why there wasn’t a boat to be had now. They had all gone south to the delta and Canfalon.

Princess Zettila was gone, lost to the enemy in the debacle on the Isle of Gingo-La. Her addiction to the cult of the goddess had finally done her in. Banwi sobbed. He missed her the most, it seemed.

And finally Aunt Haruma was gone, too. She’d announced that she was tired of his “sniveling” and that he was a disgrace to the name of Shogemessar, and she had left, and gone to her own apartment and shut the door.

There were just the guards at the door and a few slave eunuchs to bring him his meals. He was alone.

Except for the witch. She came to see him frequently, altogether too often.

Now she was there again, with that young beauty at her side to whom he was not allowed to say more than two words at a time without the witch cutting him off. They had come in through the side door again, a door to which only they had access through the next door chamber. She came unannounced, unsmiling, terrifying him with those dark eyes that seemed to bore into one, peering into one’s innermost secrets.

He pulled himself to a half-sitting position.

“As you can see, I am quite desolate. I want to go on the ship. You must make it possible for me to go aboard the ship, before it is too late!” His voice rose in a little shriek.

Ribela did not smile, did not betray her emotion.

“You were troubled again in your dreams, sire. Will you accept my help at last? I am skilled in dream soothing.”

“Hah, and let you completely take over my mind? Never, damn you. Just get me onto that ship. That’s all I want now. I will board the ship and sail away and never see my home again.”

“Sire, Your Majesty, you must pull yourself together. You must stop this sniveling! You are a man and the Fedafer of the well-watered land. You must not disgrace your ancestors.”

“My ancestors are dead. They had their turn. I am alive, and I want to stay that way.”

“You must remain in the Imperial City along with your troops. Other armies are gathering, aid is coming. By tomorrow night, there will be another legion here and enough food and equipment for us to withstand an indefinite siege. We might even be able to take the offensive.”

Banwi Shogemessar, Fedafer of Fedafers of the well-watered land stared at her. She was mad.

“Don’t you understand, you crazy woman. They brought down the tower. They are attacking now and will continue until they break through. Don’t you understand? I know what it wants! It wants me, it tells me so in the dreams.”

“Your person is very valuable, Your Majesty. You are the Fedafer of the well-watered land.”

“Exactly, and at any moment now they are going to break through, and then we will all be captured and dragged to see Sephis the Terrible.”

“Say not that name in this place, sire. It defiles the very air. That is not a god! There are no gods like that. All these idols you worship in this old land are not gods, there is no divinity in them. The thing we face is but a demon, an unwilling servant of the enemy. And it is not alone. The great enemy put forth its hand here. Use not the names of your old gods. They are gone now, sent to the shades to rest. It is not a god that we face in the pit below Dzu, it is but a demon.”

Banwi was aroused now. The damned witch dared to dismiss the gods of Ourdh as being dead and gone. There was no end to the effrontery, it was too much. Banwi exploded.

“So you say, but what you say is mostly worthless. Damn you women, you’ve destroyed our noble realm. I should have known this would happen from the first moment they suggested the alliance. You have been conniving and conspiring from the start. This is what you wanted, this is what you have desired. To throw down our throne and let the dark serpent rule the land.”

Ribela’s eyes snapped.

“Sire, I will not accept or listen to such words. The Empire of the Rose has put its strength behind you, and thus far you are still Fedafer in Ourdh.”

“The city has fallen. Lest you forget, woman, we have already been defeated. It is just a matter of time now.”

“There have been mistakes made, I admit that. But the situation will change very shortly for the better believe me.”

“Hah! You live in a fantasy world, all you witches. I will have nothing more to do with you.”

The emperor reached for the bell to summon his guards.

Ribela curtsied. “I am sorry to be unable to assist you, Your Majesty,” she said in a formal tone. “I will leave you now. Be of good heart, do not fear. We will survive this time of darkness.”

Ribela swept out with Lagdalen behind her. The guards watched them go with frank suspicion and dislike.

The door slammed closed behind them, and they started down the corridor. But before they’d gone ten feet, there was a sudden, piercing scream from within the Imperial bedchamber. They turned back. The guards were already opening the door.

The guards went through and there came terrible sounds of desperate, brief combat. One of the men was hurled directly out again, his chest stove in by a hammer blow. There was a brief shriek of agony. Steel rang on steel.

Ribela did not hesitate. Lagdalen followed, wishing she had more than just a long knife to hand. The guards were dead. Standing over them were giant forms, menlike things ten feet high that held huge hammers in their hands.

The Emperor Banwi Shogemessar, Fedafer of Fedafers, Emperor of emperors, etc. etc., was being unceremoniously stuffed into a sack by a trio of burly imps. His screams made them laugh ferociously.

The giants turned toward them. Lagdalen screamed. They had no faces, no features whatsoever. They were like unfinished statues. The nearest one swung a hammer with a head the size of a watermelon, and both women dived and rolled. The hammer whooshed past above them.

Lagdalen was at the door. Ribela stopped and spat a stream of fiery words. A bolt of blue fire burst from her fingertips and struck full on against the thing. It rocked back on its heels and blue energies traveled across its surface. Then the energies changed color, and red sparks sizzled instead. The thing rocked forward and started moving again.

Ribela shrilled another set of syllables and set them spinning, a disassociation spell for vortex integuments. The mud man’s hammer rose. It seemed immune to such quickly spoken spells.

Ribela went for the door, but the other one was already there.

She glimpsed the sack containing the emperor being carried away by the imps down a set of stairs exposed beneath the floor of the chamber.

The hammer swung, another hammer was speeding her way, and she jumped back and felt the thing slice the air just in front of her face.

She could die here in an instant.

Another hammer bounced off the wall just above her head. She slid away from the giants and at the same time away from the door. They turned, in unison, an eerie sight. They moved together and their hammers went up and down, they were like enormous mechanisms.

Ribela was trapped. She looked back to the hidden hatchway in the floor. It had been under a carpet. The room was in tumbled disarray, the bed overturned. These giants had lifted the door with such violence, they had overthrown the carpet and all the furniture piled on top of it.

The hammers swished by again. She tried to dart through between them, but a huge leg swung out to block her, and she bounced off and landed on the marble floor. She turned. The things were standing over her.

But they were not quite what they had been. Their movements had slowed and as she watched, the breath frozen in her throat, they slowed further, and the hammers dropped from their hands and bounced on the marble floor. The giants began to liquefy and soften. She stared, sobbing for breath, and in thirty seconds the huge things had slumped to rude piles of mud that continued to collapse, eventually spreading out into a treacly brown mess all over the floor of the chamber.

The Mother be thanked!

Ribela scrambled to her feet, breathing hard, shaking.

“My lady, are you alright?” Lagdalen was there, her dirk gleaming in her hand.

“Oh, my dear, that was a close call, too close indeed!” She steadied herself.

“The spell we forged was slow to work. I think because it had to be so small, so lacking in volume, which made it immune to the defensive systems.” Ribela sighed. “But it grew, and at the end it grew very quickly.” Ribela gestured to the slime. “The fighting will be over for a while now.”

And indeed they could hear the shrill bark of the cornets from the walls, something was happening there.

“But the emperor?”

“Taken by imps, down those steps. Poor man, he was right. We failed to protect him adequately. Shall we investigate?”

Lagdalen swallowed. Accompany a Great Witch and this was what was likely to happen to you. But what happened next was more than Lagdalen had even expected.

Ribela put a foot on the steps to descend and froze in place. Something was coming, something terrible, something that could make even the Queen of Mice pause.

Up from the darkness below came a figure, man-size, hidden beneath a heavy black cloak, surrounded by an aura of power. Ribela took one step back and steadied herself. The other figure halted halfway up. Lagdalen saw flames where there should have been eyes, Instinctively, she crouched beside a pillar seeking to make herself invisible.

Ribela spoke words in a tongue unknown to Lagdalen, harsh emphatic phrases. The other being laughed, a weird buzzing chuckle. In the dark beneath the hood, Lagdalen saw a glint and sparkle, as if of glossy horn. The eyes were like windows onto hell.

It spoke, a voice of rasps and inhuman grating, in the same tongue. Ribela shouted something and raised a hand, but the dark figure gave a sudden hiss and a bolt of red fire leapt out from its hand, striking Ribela in the chest. The witch gave a strange, inarticulate cry and was flung backward to the floor. The smell of burned cloth and singed flesh rose into the air. The tall figure in the cloak rose up from the darkness and stood over the fallen witch. After a moment, it kicked her prone body.

Lagdalen crouched behind the pillar, too afraid to move a muscle.

Imps appeared around the tall form in black. It gestured to the witch, and they bound her with chains and then bore her away on their shoulders.

At the sight of the imps, Lagdalen felt a familiar, red anger explode in her, and she went forward silently and hurled herself at the figure in the cloak.

It saw her only at the last minute and a hand whipped around to bat her away. But even as she was knocked down, her dirk sank into the figure’s chest.

Lagdalen was on all fours, staring up into the face of a man that had become a thing, a monster, all horn and dead white skin. It emitted a weird croak of dismay and pulled forth the Marneri knife. Red blood glinted in the. lamplight. The thing snarled and gestured to her.

Imps ran to seize her. She punched one in the face, but it kicked her and knocked the breath out of her. Strong hands grasped her arms and bound her. She was lifted up and carried away down into darkness.

General Paxion would not come out of his room in the Fortress of Zadul. He had retreated into a shell and would not respond to his staff. Over and over he mumbled a prayer for forgiveness to the wall while nodding his head.

Paxion no longer understood the world. It was as if he had been accursed. He was a simple man, brave enough, a soldier for his entire adult life. Perhaps he was not the best battlefield commander, he could accept that. He’d worked hard, though, at the job of running a fort in Kenor, and he’d done well enough at that. He had a good, solid reputation.

It seemed unjust that all that should be destroyed by this wild, terrible campaign in the heat and dust of Ourdh. But if that was the fate chosen for Paxion by the Great Goddess, then he accepted it.