A Sword for a Dragon (7 page)

The Purple Green blocked and blocked, and then only just blocked the next overhead. The wild one was outmatched in sword fighting. Vlok went the other way and swung right and then overhand to the left.

The Purple Green tripped again going backward and fell, the last sword stroke barely grazing him across the shoulder.

Vlok prepared to thrust home his blade.

Another sword interposed itself, the gleaming white steel of Ecator, and Vlok found the broketail dragon standing against him.

This was a different kettle of fish, as some might say, but Vlok’s blood was warmed, and he threw caution to the winds.

He lunged and swung and cut. Ecator met his blade each time in perfect defense and turned away his thrusts. Vlok grew wilder as his arm grew tired.

Finally he hurled himself forward and swung over-hand again. He lunged too close, and as they met, Bazil punched him hard on the side of the head. Vlok fell back, stunned into semi consciousness. For a moment, he wobbled until Baz whacked him lightly with the flat of his new sword and laid him out.

The Purple Green had regained his feet by now. There was a little blood on his shoulder. Bazil remonstrated gently with the wild one, who seemed crestfallen. Together, they picked up the fallen Vlok and carried him back to his stall.

Vlok’s dragonboy, Swane, threw himself at Relkin as he approached. The two went down in a tangle of fists and struggling limbs.

Dragoneer Hatlin intervened after a few seconds and hauled them to their feet.

“Enough!” he snapped. “Vlok started the fight. We all know how unfair that would be since the wild one is not yet skilled with the sword. The broketail did well to stop it. You two are to end this feud, do you understand?”

Neither boy raised an argument. Both were puffing, red-faced, with smuts in their hair.

Swane went into the stall, and Relkin followed. The dragons crowded inside turned to them and hissed.

“Go away. We have to talk to Vlok alone.”

The dragonboys withdrew and pulled the curtain. Behind them sibilant dragon speech began. It rose in volume occasionally when Vlok spoke, but it went on.

Hours later, Bazil and the Purple Green left.

Vlok, Swane, and Relkin met. Vlok said that there was to be no feud and no further fighting. Vlok admitted that he had been unjustly critical, that he had lost a fair fight, and it was over.

Swane and Relkin shook hands, and Relkin hoped sincerely that this would be the end of it.

That night the orders went out. The first units to board the rafts would be leaving the following morning.

A few minutes later, a man came riding up from the town bearing a message. As he passed the guard, he whispered, and the word went through the fort in a flash.

King Sanker of Marneri was dead. His daughter Besita would be crowned queen.

The news brought a sudden silence throughout the fort. Sanker was not much loved as a king, but he had reigned for a long time and his passing was sudden. Most people had known only Sanker as their king.

The news was especially troubling to Commander Porteous Glaves of the Eighth Regiment. That same day he had received a scroll from Marneri with bad news. His request for a posting to Kadein to command a detachment from the First Legion had been denied. He could not shift from unit to unit. He would actually have to go with his regiment into the war way down in Ourdh, hundreds of miles distant. Now came Sanker’s death, and any chance of a plea to the king’s ear was gone. Glaves had no connections with the new queen’s inner circle. He felt doomed.

He opened a bottle of fortified wine and took a heavy swig. He was actually going to have to spend months, maybe years, marching with a bunch of smelly dragons and soldiers all over the southlands, and quite likely would have to go into actual battle.

This was not part of the plan!

He moaned. He thought of his plump-faced adviser, Ruwat. Ruwat had suggested this. For political advantage, Ruwat had said, a necessary thing if he wanted to advance. How was he to advance if he was fighting for his life in some savage hellhole in Ourdh? The whole thing had become a disastrous fiasco. His fingers clenched uselessly, how he wanted to get his hands around Ruwat’s fat throat!

Behind its great walls and towers, the city of Marneri was decked in the color of mourning. Black flags fluttered from every spire and every topmast of the tall ships in harbor. After a reign of forty-five years, the old king was dead.

King Sanker had been an unhappy man, beset with vague fears and possessed by self-destructive passion for drink that had almost unhinged him in his final years. But he had been a good monarch, chiefly because he had realized his limitations and let his skilled advisers rule in his name. In this, he had made amends for the checkered career of his sire, King Wauk, who had involved himself in matters beyond his abilities with disastrous results.

And so they buried Sanker with honor and a thunder of drums. One hundred drummers beating a slow march led the column that included King Neath of Kadein along with five other kings, two queens, and one crown prince from the nine cities of the Argonath. Behind these glittering personages came the members of the great families of Marneri, lead by the royal Bestigari, with the Clamoth, the Andonikri, and the Tarcho following behind. Then came the clans from Exsaf, the Brusta, the Hawki, and the Rook, the great families that had come from Cunfshon to help win back the land of Argonath. And there were more, high families from all the great cities and from Kenor, with military men in the uniforms of the legions, and civilians in black with the white blaze of Marneri on the breast.

Then came a great throng of merchants, sea captains, landowners, and general businessmen, all in the same funereal garb with badges of the white blaze affixed to breast or hat.

Lining the way down Tower Street and Foluran Hill was the mass of the population, with country folk from Seant and Aubinas and Seinster and the Blue Hills, plus artisans and other workers from every town and city in the region.

Marching among the Tarcho clan was Lagdalen, now a veteran of the great war. She wore the black weeds and velvet hood and she walked without her husband, for Captain Kesepton was far away, attached to General Hektor’s staff on the expedition to Ourdh. Yet Lagdalen of the Tarcho did not walk alone, for at her side was Lessis of Valmes, wearing a frayed and faded old black cloak and worn-down shoes.

Lagdalen was acutely aware of the great honor done her by Lessis, who was the ranking representative of the Emperor of the Rose and a Great Witch of power, the “grey lady,” the same pale, thin woman of indeterminate middle age and calm expression, who had walked in king’s funerals for five hundred years.

Lessis could have been walking in the front rank, with the king of Kadein, but instead she walked beside her former assistant among the Tarcho clan.

Lagdalen’s father and mother walked just ahead of her, and her brothers and sisters walked beside and behind. All of them were very conscious of Lessis’s presence and very proud as a result. Many were both envious of Lagdalen and slightly awestruck by her new status. Just a year and a half ago, Lagdalen was a humble novice in the Temple Service. She was said to be troubled, unlikely to rise very fast or very far. There was even some story about a dalliance with an elfboy. Suddenly she was proclaimed as a heroine fit for legends, returned from the dread city of the enemy in glory, and engaged to wed the heroic young Captain Hollein Kesepton. They had duly been married a month later, and she now tended their first child.

Her relatives, her elder sisters, her mother and father, her cousins, all were struggling to cope with this change. They hadn’t been used to giving her much respect and now felt they had to. This rankled for some. Lagdalen walked a field laid with snares and pitfalls every day, for a careless word could start a crescendo of gossip and rumor.

But Lagdalen’s thoughts were far away from such concerns. She marched the familiar streets, past the quiet crowds, and her thoughts were mostly with her baby Laminna, now in the arms of her wet nurse, in their apartment in the Tower of Guard. Or with Hollein, out there somewhere in the vast interior of the continent. She tried not to think too much about the perils he might face. He was a full captain of the legion, and would serve at least eight more years, perhaps for the rest of his life. He might be killed at any time. She had to accept that.

Through all this, she thought very little about old King Sanker. It was true that he had been king all her life and for a long time before that, but when she thought of royalty in Marneri now she thought of the new queen, Besita.

Lagdalen had come to know Besita very well in the past few months, ever since Besita had returned from the great hospital in Bea where the witches had labored to pull out the roots of the evil spell set into her by the stone deity of Tummuz Orgmeen. Back in Marneri, Besita had been surrounded at once by a team of dedicated young men and women, including Lagdalen, who worked to continue the princess’s recovery from sorcery.

Besita was a queen with a great many problems confronting her. She was not a hardworking person by nature and had already discovered how heavy the burden of a royal person’s working day could be. Now it would be ten times as heavy. Besita would have to apply herself, and this she would dislike intensely. It would be a constant struggle for her to keep her attention focused on important matters, but it would have to be done and done well, for her very life and that of the white city itself would depend upon her diligence.

Intrigues were thick on the ground around her throne. She was queen, but queen of a city divided by her succession.

Everyone had always expected her cretinous brother Erald to become king. Old Sanker had always hated his daughter and claimed her bastard. There were good grounds for such suspicions. Her mother, Losset, had had numerous public adulterous liaisons, until Sanker finally had her executed for treason. But Erald had been harmed even before birth when a desperately unhappy Losset had indulged in heavy drinking bouts in the royal apartments. As Erald grew older, he became a clear threat to the city, a degenerate with a taste for repulsive, cruel pleasures.

He had died mysteriously, six months before, and everyone knew that he had been killed by the witches. Thus did the empire prune and trim the family trees of the Enniad royalties.

Sanker, already a bitter man, became quite venomous in his last few months. Soon after Erald’s death, however, his health began to break down for good. First it was his liver and then it was his lungs, and he fell ill with a racking cough.

The sisters took him to the Temple hospital eventually, but there was little that could be done. As he lay dying in their care, so his final efforts to have Besita murdered were discovered and the plots were smothered.

The king was dead, the queen now sat the throne of Marneri.

At the corner of Tower Street and Foluran Hill, the procession turned to the right and went down to the massive, squat shape of the Temple of the Great Mother.

The burial ceremonies were long, almost endless, or so it seemed to Lagdalen, but at last the king was buried, and a shout of “Long live the queen!” went up. The shout was echoed and reechoed but without full enthusiasm, another sign of the questions hanging over the succession. The folk of Marneri were as yet unsure of their new monarch and uncertain of her legitimacy.

The alternative to crowning Besita would likely be civil war with the great families grappling for the throne. No one wanted that.

Still, people were unhappy. There was the uncomfortable fact that the new queen had succumbed to an unnatural glamour worked on her by the fallen Doom of Tummuz Orgmeen. The witches had cleared her, expunging the taint, or so they said, but could there be any doubt that she would be their creature now? Any independence the city might have enjoyed was surely in jeopardy. The cities were constitutional monarchies, but the power of the sovereign was still very great.

The Empire of the Rose was not an empire in the traditional mode. Little money flowed to the emperor from his subject satrapies. The empire had been created for the sole purpose of reversing the fall of Veronath and removing the demon lords who ruled in the Dark Ages. The emperor sought to guide the cities and the free colonies, not to dictate to them. At least that was what they were supposed to believe. But here they saw the naked hand of the witches of Cunfshon, the emperor’s servants, manipulating the succession. It rankled in the city.

The ceremonies continued with the burning of incense and the singing of hymns until they rose and left the Temple and dispersed outside leaving Sanker for the history books.

Lessis took Lagdalen by the arm.

“Come, my dear, walk with me, I have things to discuss with you.”

They turned left and cut through to the Garden of Maternity, strolling uphill toward the Tower of Guard.

“A bitter business this,” said Lessis.

“The funeral, my lady?”

“No dear, the succession. We had to do it, poor Sanker could not accept the necessity. He never recovered from what Losset did to him.”

Lagdalen said nothing. Lessis had discussed the state of Marneri’s affairs with her before, but she had not heard this particular admission.

“You killed him, lady?”

“Not as such, girl, but when we removed Erald, we took away his last hope. His death came swiftly then. Poor man.”

Lessis gave a heavy sigh. “Over the years I have had to shoulder the burden of killing many men and women, you know that by now, and I think you understand the necessity for it.”

Lagdalen felt those grey eyes on her, and she shivered, sensing the power in the other. Lessis shrugged.

“In my work, it has been a sad necessity far more often than I ever dreamed of when I was young. I have forgotten most of these people whom I had chosen to destroy, but Sanker I will not forget. I remember him as a terrified teenager at his coronation. His father had dealt with him quite brutally all his life. It was a wonder the boy was still sane, but he survived and, in fact, he did quite well at kingship. It went to his head a little perhaps, and he fancied himself a great general of the armies, alas. When the last great crisis broke, I was sent to force him to relinquish any real role in the command of the legions. He hated me for that. It ruined him in a way, but he never sank into real wickedness.”