A Sword for a Dragon (9 page)

Lessis’s eyes opened briefly. She managed a weak smile and then closed them again. Ribela bent to put her ear by Lessis’s lips. Lessis whispered in the language of cats.

Ribela turned away and clapped her hands for the nurses to return to their posts. She stalked out of the chamber, and outside she turned to Fi-ice.

“Who is responsible for the surgical work on the Lady Lessis?” she said most directly.

Fi-ice was taken aback, struggled to reply, not wishing to damn the high surgeon.

“Come on, woman, out with it,” snapped Ribela.

“The high surgeon, Carleso.”

“Ah, so a man is surgeon here. Well, he is to be commended. Excellent work. Excellent. Tell me, how long has it been that you have allowed a man to be high surgeon here in Marneri?”

“Ah, a man?”

“Yes, a person of the male sex,” said Ribela, as if she was speaking to a simpleton.

“I do not know, lady, since the city was founded perhaps.”

“Extraordinary. Are you sure you can trust him? Men are so easily governed by their passions. I have found them generally unsuited for precise, consistent work.”

Fi-ice remembered, Ribela was from Defwode, the most conservative and matriarchal canton of Cunfshon.

“Things are different here in the Argonath, lady. Men are fully equal in all things.”

Ribela did not seem pleased with this idea.

“So I’ve heard,” she murmured. A moment later, she drew Burly aside into an empty office and closed the door, leaving Fi-ice and Plesenta outside.

Burly was still breathing hard, and seething inwardly at the wound to his dignity. To make a lord chamberlain run up and down on an errand like that?

It was unheard of. It was abominable. He might have had a heart attack.

Ribela stood in front of him and held him with those terrible black eyes. There was no moving once they fastened on you.

“I must leave at once for Ourdh. The situation there is very dangerous.”

The sooner the better thought Burly.

Ribela noted his sour expression.

“I apologize, my lord chamberlain. Lessis was so close to death, I dared not wait an unnecessary moment. I am grateful that you can still run so briskly at your age.”

“Harrum, uhm.”

“Sometimes, my lord, we find ourselves forced to take up duties far outside of our normal scope of operations.”

Burly saw a flicker of warmth cross that cold, perfect exterior, the cheeks like white marble, the lips like metal painted glossy red. To Ribela this was a joke, she challenged him to laugh with her. After all, why should she be here? She had other work to do, work that Burly could not even imagine.

“I see,” he murmured, “I think. But tell me, what brings the Queen of Mice to have such an interest in the civil war in Ourdh? The place has been run by pestilential rulers since time immemorial. What difference will it make?”

“If Ourdh falls to the forces of Sephis, then the Masters will be able to obtain an army of women for their breeding pens. Some women live long enough to produce twelve imps, one a month, in those pens. Think of an army of one hundred twenty thousand imps. We could lose Kenor, perhaps be forced back to the shores of the ocean.”

Burly shivered. He could see swarms of the enemy, a foul horde marching beneath the banners of the skull and thorn-pierced heart, stretching from horizon to horizon.

“You conjure up a most terrible vision.” He shuddered. “I pray that we can avert this.”

“We shall, old Burly, we shall. And you must help us here by putting aside your feelings and helping Besita as she becomes queen.”

Burly’s hackles rose again.

Sanker was barely in the ground, where they’d put him, these witches. Burly was bitter for his old king.

“Come, old Burly, let go of the pain. We know your honor, and we respect you. Sanker did his best, but he could not be allowed to foist Erald on the city of Marneri. You know that.”

Ribela had been enjoined by Lessis to “tread lightly, Sister, the people of Marneri are not like those of Defwode.” Ribela struggled to “tread lightly”. It was not in her nature, alas.

But her needs were simple. She would take Lessis’s place and immediately sail for Ourdh. To assist her, she would require the services of the young lady of the Tarcho family, who had been Lessis’s assistant until recently.

Burly pointed out that the girl was now the mother of a newborn. She would not wish to leave Marneri. He received a withering look from those dark, hypnotic eyes.

“I know,” she said, as if addressing a dolt of barely human intelligence. “But the girl also knows her duty, and in this instance, duty that must prevail. Send her to me.”

Gulping for air, Burly left the witch and sent a message at once to the apartments of the Tarcho.

Lagdalen received the message in the nursery where she tended to baby Laminna. The message was peremptory. She left the baby with the wet nurse and ran down the hill to the Temple.

In a modest office room on the third floor, she found the Lady Ribela waiting, the Seeress herself, standing like a statue by a window.

The velvet cloak shifted.

“Thank you for your promptness, my dear.”

“I require your assistance for the mission I must undertake since your mistress has been disabled.”

Lagdalen swallowed, her heart suddenly leaden. Leave now? And lose Laminna?

The witch was staring at her with those extraordinary eyes.
She bewitches me
, thought Lagdalen. “I am given no choice…”

But there was no spell, just the steady gaze. Lagdalen knew her duty, she had learned well from Lessis. She would go. And yet she felt the most dreadful sorrow. She heard a keening cry, and realized only dimly that it was herself who made it.

Ribela’s perfect marble face grew taut.

“It is your duty girl! You have served Lessis well and been commended. You have experience of these matters, and that will be vital. I cannot have someone who knows nothing of the ways of the enemy on this mission.”

Still Lagdalen struggled. Laminna’s infancy would be gone by the time she returned, she would lose that sweetest of motherhood’s seasons.

Lagdalen could hardly find words. She was stunned, choked, horrified, and yet unable to say no.

She acquiesced and fled to sob uncontrollably over Laminna in her cradle. The nurse, Wessary, did her best to console her, but to little avail.

Her mother, Lacustra, became indignant on hearing the news and became determined to intervene. Loudly she proclaimed that the Great Witch was not to take Lagdalen from her babe. Lagdalen had already given enough of herself to the cause. It was not the place of well-born girls like Lagdalen to be exposed again and again to this kind of hellish danger.

Lacustra went to Tommaso Tarcho, the father of Lagdalen. Tommaso agreed with his wife. His daughter was now a mother, her battles were behind her. He would not allow this abduction.

But Lagdalen pleaded with them to do nothing. Her duty was clear, she could not deny it. The Great Witch was absolutely right, Lagdalen had the experience that was needed.

“Though it tears my heart in half, I must leave Laminna to Wessary, my Wessie will take care of her. I cannot bear it but I must, and I will.”

Tommaso drew back then from his daughter. He scarcely recognized this young woman as the child he had prayed for during her troubled adolescence. But listening to her tone of voice, he understood that her mind could not be swayed.

“You have the will of the Tarchos, that is certain” was all he said in the end.

Lacustra had more difficulty in accepting it, but at length she retired to her own parlor, where she wept and muttered about the disrespect done to her and her family by the Great Witches. Her daughter, taken twice by the witches and made to serve in fantastic, foreign places where death and danger lurked in dread diversity.

Lagdalen stayed beside Laminna’s cradle for most of the night. Wessary packed together some clothes for the journey, with spare sandals, a dirk of Cunfshon steel, a broad-brimmed hat to keep off rain and sun, and a Kenor freecoat, freshly waxed and waterproofed. Wessary had removed the wool lining of the coat and replaced missing buttons and clasps.

Lagdalen left at dawn, wearing the dark brown free-coat and carrying a rolled-up blanket and a small pack. She boarded the white ship
Merkuri
and sailed on the tide, heading down the Long Sound, its destination distant Ourdh.

Under blue skies, the Marneri Second Legion drifted down the River Argo through mild spring days. Their long rafts were in the center of a fleet of barges and commandeered brigs and riverboats. The rafts each carried three hundred men or fifty men and their horses, or one hundred men and ten dragons.

The men were cheerful enough about the expedition, but their general was not. General Paxion was a bag of nerves and doubts. He’d spent twenty years running a fort. That was what he knew how to do. He was devoted to knowing the details and making skillful decisions about small matters. He knew every drunk and most of the thieves by reputation. He was able to maintain firm justice, fair discipline, and was generally well liked by the men.

He did not look forward to campaigning in distant Ourdh under a hot sun with flies and mosquitoes and sickness in the ranks. At his age, it seemed like madness.

Still, the orders had been direct and emphatic. Hektor wanted to Second Legion as quickly as possible, and Paxion was on the scene so he would take the command.

The orders had gone on to include voluminous preparations for fighting off an attack by river pirates, which swarmed in northern Ourdh and who had gone over entirely to the Sephisti. This had prompted many unwelcome thoughts. The Sephisti were said to be very numerous and fanatical to the point of suicidal martyrdom. Were they sailing south to catastrophe, to end trussed up .and burnt alive as offerings to a dark satanic god?

Now, at the head of a legion sailing off into strange and dangerous waters, he felt terribly unsure. It seemed so unfair, that a good, industrious military career should be destroyed like this, for he doubted his ability to stand up to the pressures that lay ahead.

“You’re past it, you fool!” he said to himself in the mirror when he shaved.

The men were much less stricken with gloom than their commanding officer. In fact, a majority were eager to see the distant cities of Ourdh, so enormous in both fact and legend, and perhaps to sample some of the pleasures of the fleshpots.

Life in Dalhousie and the rest of Kenor was life on the frontier. The men had mostly come from the older cities of the Argonath and remembered more civilized ways.

In the evenings, they gathered around braziers of coals and sang the Kenor song while passing a little surreptitious rye whiskey among themselves.

“Waking through the land of Kenor, free and strong and in our hands…”

In the dark, the yellow lanterns of the fleet stretched up the river like a stream of stars, and the voices of the men rang off the water and carried away into the dark.

General Paxion found it hard to sleep. He spent much of the night anxiously reviewing each light through the telescope to assure himself that all was well.

On the second day, the rolling hill country of the Middle Argo gave way to a flatter landscape divided by the river. To the south lay forests of oak, pine, ash, and hemlock. To the north, the forests thinned out quickly into the Gan, a vast steppe that stretched away into the north as far as the Black Mountains that bordered Dragon Home.

The villages of the Middle Argo petered out here, and at night there were few lights and very far between. Long after sunset, they entered the Baratan Swamps, where the river lost itself for a dozen leagues of small lakes and twisting channels.

The moon rose and with it came the sound of a million amphibians caught in the frenzy of early spring. The night resounded to their wheeps, whoops, stirrups, and roars.

The men found the racket painful after a while and turned in with much grumbling, but the dragons were most curiously affected by the sounds of their amphibian cousins. They drifted to the side rails of barges and rafts, and when all were gathered on one side the vessels would tilt and men would roll out of bunks and awake with startled cries of woe and fury.

The amphibious chorus continued unabated and in the hearts of the great wyverns some ancient chord was struck, and they remained awake, listening intently and occasionally muttering together in the ancient tongue as the fleet drifted through the dark bayous and open lakes.

Later, when the moon was setting, they left the swamps behind and the dragons returned to their beds in the center of the raft. Rafts righted themselves once again, men were pitched back and forth as before and a chorus of human complaint arose in the place of amphibian breeding uproar.

The next morning, they awoke to find the rafts approaching the smooth cone of Mt. Kenor, its crown still ringed with snow.

Bazil and Relkin had spent the winter in the fort that sat on the north flank of the mountain. To them the country here was all too familiar. To the north was the dun drabness of the Gan. They had crossed that land the year before, on their way north to the city of Tummuz Orgmeen. Relkin had no desire to see it again.

To the south were the new wheat lands of Kenor, with isolated farms scattered through the broad-leaved forest. Far away to the east loomed the distant hills of Esk.

Signal flags fluttered from the fort and were responded to from General Paxion’s cutter. Shortly afterward, Paxion put in at the landing beneath the fort and met there with General Dausar. There was a message from General Hektor, who was now far to the south of them in the land of the Tekatek Teetol.

Paxion was urged to hurry south as quickly as possible. There was a battle looming in central Ourdh. The Emperor Banwi Shogemessar was leading the Imperial Host north from the great city on the east bank. He would cross over at Kwa and meet the Sephisti hordes somewhere north of there on the west bank.

General Hektor was determined to get both of his legions to that battle. He was convinced that they were essential to the cause. He already feared for the lack of morale in the Imperial forces.