A Sword for a Dragon (8 page)

Lessis put her hands behind her back as she walked. Lagdalen knew the mannerism well and knew she was about to hear important news.

“But guilt is guilt, and I have more than my share of it. It comes with a life such as mine.” Lessis looked up and smiled at her. “And when I see one such as you, my darling Lagdalen, I am renewed and ready to fight on.”

Then the smile disappeared, and Lessis looked down again.

“We have a terrible fight on our hands right now. I must ask for your help. I sail on the tide for Ourdh. The situation there is growing quite desperate. The ruler, the Fedafer, is in a state of complete panic and is likely to surrender to his enemies through sheer intimidation. He is a weak man. But if the priests of Sephis get hold of him, they will make him a slave of evil and a servant of the dark forces.”

Lagdalen was surprised. She knew very well that Lessis had a deep dislike of Ourdhi society, where extreme patriarchy prevailed and women were treated as slaves with few rights.

“As you might imagine, I do not want to go.” Lagdalen did not doubt the sincerity in Lessis’s voice. “But I must. And yet our affairs here in Marneri are entering a very delicate stage. Someone must watch over Besita. She is such a goose, as you well know.”

Lagdalen nodded.

“But if she will work hard, she can be a very good queen. She needs someone to help her, to guide her, and keep her attention fixed on matters of state.”

“Yes, lady, of course.”

Lessis clasped her hand. “It is very good of you to take up this service when you are a mother with a newborn babe, and on behalf of the Office, I thank you. But now we must ask you to take even more of the burden. You must take my place. You must be at her side as much as is humanly possible, and you must try to keep her steady somehow.”

Lagdalen felt a pang of regret. She could not refuse, but she wanted nothing more than to be with Laminna, her babe of three months. Nor did she want to spend time nursing a petulant queen with a horror of hard work. But she knew it would have to be done, or Besita might give in to a weakness and lose everything in an afternoon.

“Yes, my lady.”

“Thank you, child, I know what a sacrifice this is, and again I must tell you how much I appreciate your courage and your sense of duty. Things are moving to a critical stage of our great enterprise. Our success at Tummuz Orgmeen has given the Master’s a shocking defeat, quite unexpected. They have responded by unleashing this long prepared civil war in Ourdh. There is a great evil at work there, and we must destroy it. We cannot allow Ourdh to sink into the clutches of the dark forces.”

They came around the corner of the camellias and passed the statue to the Fertile Mother.

A shadowy shape leapt out of concealment at the base of the statue and slipped up behind them.

At the very last moment, Lessis sensed the man and half turned, raising her arm. This saved her life for his first blow was deflected off the bone in her upper arm.

She gave a little cry of pain and shock, and struck at the man with her fist, connecting just below his Adam’s apple, not enough to stop him. He swung again, a professional assassin’s stroke even as Lagdalen threw herself at him and rammed a knee into his belly. In horror, she saw the black metal dirk sink into Lessis’s side.

Lagdalen’s scream brought shouts from nearby. Men in Marneri blue and red were on the scene and, with a weird shriek of insane joy, the man ran at them and died on their swords.

Lagdalen knelt beside Lessis, who was unconscious. There was a pink froth on her lips, death seemed imminent. Lagdalen felt her chest constrict and her mind go black with panic, horror, and a vast wave of sorrow.

Word of the disaster was sent at once to Cunfshon on the clipper
Stormwind
. Even with every scrap of sail clapped on and favorable winds across the Bright Sea, the passage would take a week. In the meantime the witches on the scene in Marneri did their best to keep Lessis alive.

She was rushed to the hospital in the Temple and examined by the high surgeon himself. One lung was found collapsed and a major blood vessel cut. This had to be repaired manually, a task close to the limits of surgical skill in the Empire of the Rose.

As the high surgeon worked with needle and fine thread, the witches of Marneri struggled to build a strong spell that would keep Lessis’s spirit within her body and prevent any further weakening of her hold on life. It was difficult. Lessis had lost a lot of blood and was very close to death. After eight hours of chanting and spell work the witches ceased. Lessis survived in a state approaching that of hibernation. She could be fed through a straw, and she continued to breathe, slowly.

Ten days after the
Stormwind
cleared the harbor bar, a white herring gull flew into the city and made its way to the roof of the Temple in mid-evening. There, it set down and raised an outcry of gull squall until the Mistress of Animals, Fi-ice, climbed to the high roof and spoke with it. The message she received electrified her.

At once, she sent couriers to the Abbess Plesenta and the Princess Besita. They were to join her in the chamber of the Black Mirror. A response was coming from Cunfshon. A Great Witch was coming in person.

At the bell announcing the fall of night, the three met by the mirror and formed the circle.

Princess Besita, soon to be queen, was terrified. Helplessly she had protested to Fi-ice that since she was to be crowned in a matter of days, surely she should not be risked at the Black Mirror?

Alas, replied Fi-ice, there was a shortage of witches or priestesses who were experienced in the opening of the mirror. Three were needed, and only Fi-ice, Plesenta, and Besita in all of Marneri at that moment were privy to the knowledge required. In this could be seen the malice of old Sanker, who had forced Besita to take this service, in the often remarked hope that something would snatch the “dollop of bastardy” in the dark and feast on it. And so Besita had more experience with the mirror than even Fi-ice, who was a Witch of Standing and who, one day, might even be one of the Great.

In the high chamber in the Tower of Guard, they joined hands, created the spell, and opened the Black Mirror. It came with a hot, terrifying hiss, like a stream of oil striking red hot metal.

Set into a slab of black stone there was now a window blown through the fabric of the world, gazing into the hotly energetic subworld of chaos.

There was a background of grey emptiness, the chaotic ether. Here slid tumbling, whirling shapes of clouds and tentacles. Here ruled the monstrous Thing-weights, dread horrors of the dark.

Wherever mortal humans opened such mirrors or entered the subworld for the advantages of swift travel between places in higher worlds, they risked a fearsome death. Priestesses had been snatched from before the mirror, taken in the wink of an eye by a Thingweight’s tentacle flashing through into the high world of Ryetelth.

From the hot ether of chaos came a continual roaring sound, the surf noise of an ocean of molten lead that lapped on sands of iron. Hot red sparks snapped and popped from the mirror’s surface. Suddenly Fi-ice sensed the traveler. She came a long way, and she came quickly. There was a tremendous power in the person making contact. Fi-ice marveled, there were but thirteen of the Great, and only ten who still served in Cunfshon. Who might it be? Sausun of the golden hair? Or Irene of Alaf, the great orator with ultimate powers of voice and control with voice? Whoever it was, she had fantastic strength in the astral powers.

An orange flash swept the mirror. The three women tensed. Then they saw tentacles of orange-yellow going away from them, heading on toward the traveler. An errant predator of the subworld, a small one, had sensed the oncoming traveler and swept in to investigate. It had missed the mirror.

They glimpsed for a moment a tumbling, tigerish thing the size of a sperm whale, with the texture of a storm cloud bolt past and on toward the traveler. Then it was gone, reduced to a dot in the distance.

From the distance there came a bright flash of scarlet, and a moment later the predatory thing came hurtling back, crumpled, crushed, virtually flattened.

Fi-ice drew a tiny breath and tried to concentrate on simply keeping the mirror open. The power in that flash had been enormous. As she’d suspected, the traveler was one of the most powerful of the Great.

But the flash of energy would not go unnoticed in the near regions of chaos. Like blood in the ocean, it would quickly attract much greater predators.

There began a faint, distant flickering of purple energies, far away, behind the traveler. Soon it looked like lightning flashes beneath a distant storm cloud.

“Hurry, Traveler, you are sourced by a Thing-weight,” called Fi-ice with her astral voice.

Besita had tears running down her cheeks while she trembled and shook. The Abbess Plesenta was bracing herself, wide-eyed. This service at the mirror was getting to be too frequent. Only a year or so before they’d almost lost Lessis here.

The traveler accelerated and could be seen now, a tiny black dot hurtling across the spasm of chaos. But the faraway purple energies and the colossus that hung above them were coming much faster. Already the gross exterior shapes of the Thingweight were becoming clear, and the flashes from the energetic section were enormous, painful on the eyes.

White-hot spats of energy were now leaping from the surface of the mirror like silver salmon breaking from black water.

Outrigger tentacles, like hairs at this distance, were twitching forward. If one of them found the mirror, it would take them all in a moment and form a feeding siphon here. If undiscovered and not destroyed, it would suck the entire city into its maw through gross mental suggestion. They would go as helplessly as moths to a candle, sucked down one by one into the obscene palpations of the darkness, where their life force would be burnt in brief flashes of euphoria on the receptor surfaces of the Thingweight.

Besita was close to breaking point.

The onrushing monster was the size of a large mountain, perhaps more. The palps were thrashing with excitement, blips of white heat were spattering from the mirror’s surface like water on molten steel. Besita started to scream and tried to wrench her hand free of Plesenta’s, who held on with a grunt of effort.

Suddenly a tall woman of angular appearance wearing a black cloak stepped out of the mirror and stood on the dais.

With a gasp, Plesenta let go and Besita jumped back, snapping the triune. The mirror closed with a final explosive crack of energies.

The three stood there for a moment, dripping perspiration and shivering from stark, unalloyed terror. The newcomer stared at them wordlessly. She was immaculate, her black velvet cloak and boots spotless, not a single black hair out of place.

Fi-ice went forward to greet the traveler. She knew at once who it was. There was no mistaking the black velvet garb nor the motif of silver mouse skulls on her hems and rings and even on the ends of the skewers that held her long black hair pinned back. It was Ribela of Defwode, the oldest of the old, the Hidden One, the Seeress, the Queen of Mice. There were hundreds of names for her, accumulated over six centuries of service to the Empire of the Rose.

Fi-ice was struck by how lean was the face and how intimidating were the slanted black eyes. Then Ribela put her gloved hands together and brought them up in front of her like schoolgirls before a beloved teacher.

“Thank you, Sisters,” she said in a sweet, husky voice. “You behaved with courage, I shall commend you.”

They followed as the Great Witch strode from the room. Along the way they collected Burly, the chamberlain to the dead King Sanker, and Lady Flavia of the Novitiate.

Both were stunned. Indeed, Burly was terrified by the sight of the woman. Ribela of Defwode had not been seen in human form in a hundred years. She was said to wage her war in other worlds, countering the efforts of the Masters of Padmasa to ally with other centers of the dark power.

And yet Ribela was here in Marneri. To Burly it meant that something truly terrible was happening.

At Lessis’s bedside, Ribela immediately began to weave a Greatspell, sending everyone, Burly and Besita included, to fetch her the necessary ingredients.

Burly puffed down the hill to the harbor and ordered the fins of three mackerel to be cut off and placed in some paper for him. Then he half ran back up the hill to the Temple and skipped in like any twelve-year-old boy might.

He bumped into Plesenta, the abbess was dancing along with her skirts in hand and some twigs of liomel.

They gasped, self-conscious at last. What in the world were they doing, skipping along like this, the lord chamberlain and the abbess of Marneri’s Temple?

They both tried to hold themselves, to come to a halt and resume their more natural gravity. Indeed, for a moment both thought they’d succeeded, only to find their legs still in motion. Together they ran up the stairs so quickly their hearts were thundering in their chests, and then they ran down the corridor and so to Ribela’s side.

The room was filled with smoke. A small fire was burning on an altar slab. Standing at the head of Les-sis’s bed, Ribela was reading from the Birrak, forming declensions and foundations for the Greatspell work she was about to do.

Lady Flavia came in with a white dove and long shears.

Ribela worked on. The liomel twigs were burnt and filled the chamber with their sweet musk. The fins of the mackerel were burnt next and overlaid the musk with a fishy stench. Ribela droned on, her voice gradually building in power until she began to form complete volumes and shape them with
creata cadenza
. The great words of power boomed and hissed in the room. She cut the dove’s head off and sprinkled its blood in the flames.

The sound of wings frantically beating for escape seemed to fill their ears, though the bird lay limp in Ribela’s hand. Gradually the sound diminished. Ribela laid her hands on Lessis’s forehead. Then she whispered something in her ear.