Dragon Thief (8 page)

A line of black-armored Grünwald militia had emerged from the tree line.

I stepped between the approaching troops and the two girls and raised my hands in what I hoped was a nonthreatening gesture. A bull of a man broke ranks to walk up toward me. He had the typically elaborate Grünwald armor, all black leather, spikes, and embossed skulls. He wore a helmet with a visor in the shape of a screaming demon.

We weren't going to run away or fight our way out of it, so we were left with trying to negotiate. Fortunately, of the three, that was my strength. I just hoped Mary would catch on and play along.

I faced the approaching commander and said, “Thank the black soul of the Dark Lord Nâtlac you've arrived. You won't believe what we've had to—”

The guy interrupted me with a gauntleted hand slamming me in the side of the head.

The world went black.

“Okay,” I groaned some interminable time later. After the pain of the word sank into my skull, I added, “Talking is bad.”

“Ahh, the prodigal wakes!”

My eyes shot open. I knew that voice.

A fuzzy smear almost the size of a man dominated my blurry field of vision. I shook my head to try and clear it, and my consciousness rattled around like a dried pea in a coconut husk. The blur defined itself as I squinted.

“Dudley?”

The recently elevated king of Grünwald stared down at me, smiling. “It has been a long, long time, hasn't it?”

He knows! Somehow the bastard knows who I am.

It was clear to me from the predatory grin on that pudgy face that Dudley knew that inside the body of the grandmaster thief Snake resided the soul of his nemesis, Frank Blackthorne.

As that thought crossed my mind, I completely forgot the first principle of how the universe expresses its hate for me; things
never
go wrong in exactly the way I expect. In fact, the more certain I am of any one ill outcome, the more severely the reality diverges. The idea he knew I was Frank hit me with such certainty that I almost missed when Dudley took me off the main trail and headed off into uncharted woods.

“What did you say?” I asked, because I didn't believe what I'd thought I'd heard.

“I said that I always knew you'd come back here, brother. I never stopped watching for you.”

Brother?

Dudley leaned forward so we were almost nose-to-nose. “The life of an outlaw never did quite suit you, did it, Bartholomew? Or should I call you ‘Snake' now?”

Oh crap.

Dudley gave me a self-satisfied smile as he congratulated himself on outsmarting me. “You're our father's son, Bartholomew. I knew, as soon as Mother died, that I would see you return. Just like him, you could never accept the shift of power to Mother's line. But I'm afraid your claim on this crown died with him.”

Dudley backed away from me, giving me the first clear view of where I was. I sat on a wooden chair in a windowless stone room. I saw a cot and a table bearing a small oil lantern that provided the only light in the room. Two large men in Grünwald armor flanked a rusty iron door a couple of short strides behind Dudley.

“So if I renounce my claim to the crown you'll let us all go?”

Dudley laughed. “I see you still have your sense of humor.”

“You're too established; I would need an army to challenge you.”

He spun around and backhanded me. I'll give the twerp credit, he was able to muster a lot more force than I expected from someone with the constitution of day-old pea soup. “Do not mock me. Don't pretend I'm a fool, even in jest.”

“No, Dudley. You are no fool.”

Some of my true feelings must have leaked out in my voice, and he struck me again. Between that, and still being dizzy from waking up, I lost my balance and tumbled out of the chair.

“You think I don't know what you've been doing?” He yelled down at me.
“You think I don't know?”
He threw a kick into my stomach. It was weak but elicited a groan. “Why else would you amass such wealth if not to raise an army against me?” He placed his boot on my shoulder and rolled me onto my back. “And why bring six maidens into my demesne all by yourself, if not to make a sacrifice to gain the Dark Lord's favor and seal your victory?”

I couldn't help myself. I started laughing.

It was just so perfectly
wrong
. I couldn't even stop when he started kicking me again. I wheezed and spat out, “They aren't maidens.” But it was so low I don't think he heard me. After a few kicks, he finally landed a lucky shot that slammed the breath from me. I gasped, my giggle fit broken.

He leaned over me, panting from his exertion. “Funny now? Is it? Well here's . . . the punch line.” He took another deep breath. “The Dark Lord's . . . getting his sacrifice. But I'm going . . . to officiate. And you're . . . the prize offering.”

He straightened up and waved at the two guards. One opened the iron door.

I sat up as Dudley walked away.

“Royal blood . . . and my own flesh. Going to count . . . for something.” He turned around as he reached the door. “Enjoy the accommodations . . . the King's Suite is . . . the most palatial . . . cell in the dungeon.”

The door shut me in with a slam, creaking as it locked.

“I don't believe this,” I whispered. I stood with a groan, Snake's bruised body creaking almost as much as the door had.

I hadn't thought my opinion of my body's prior occupant could sink any lower, but finding out that he was a bastard prince of the Grünwald court . . .

“Bartholomew?
Really?
No wonder you went by ‘Snake.'”

I had only a vague idea of the history of the Grünwald royals. But I was clear on a few points: the past king had a few bastard children, of which Snake must be one. And given Dudley's little rant, it was obvious that Snake's relation with his stepmom was strained at best. Especially since Queen Fiona had assassinated her husband. Given that Grünwald traced royal lines via paternal descent, if Snake was Dudley's older brother, he'd have a more legitimate claim to the crown than Dudley did. I suppose desperation helped give Dudley a rudimentary spine.

And I had unleashed this—literal—bastard on the Lendowyn court; a completely amoral royal with a grudge; a
Grünwald
royal, which earned him bonus points in the ruthless evil department; someone who had the ability to finance his own army.

That suddenly placed a more sinister spin—if one was needed—on the fact that a dragon had obliterated a Grünwald border town. In isolation it made no sense. But if Snake—aka Prince Bartholomew—was influencing Lendowyn, it could be a feint in a coming invasion.

I sat on the cot, buried my face in my hands, and marveled at the infinite capacity of things to get worse.

 • • • 

As always, “worse” is a relative term.

After confirming that my skills weren't up to opening the door from the inside, I collapsed on the cot and contemplated exactly how bad things had gotten. One bad decision on my part, and it wasn't just me suffering for it: I bore responsibility for the six girls who had followed me into this dark hole. Lucille may have become the spearpoint in a war against Grünwald because of someone she thought was me. Then there were the victims who died in that attack, and the thousands who would die in a war between Lendowyn and Grünwald.

I think I had a good grasp on what Laya must have felt when she asked me how to
not
feel. “I don't know,” I whispered, my eyes blurred for reasons other than a blow to the head.

A voice answered me. “This is amusing.”

“Who's there?” I bolted upright, looking for the source of the voice. The door remained shut, and the small oil lamp shone into every corner of the stone cell. As I frantically looked for the speaker, the lamp guttered and started burning with a dimmer, redder light. As the shadows in the room darkened, the voice laughed.

The sound dug into my skin like tiny needles pulling spools of barbed thread behind them.

I got unsteadily to my feet as the cell plunged into a flickering ruddy twilight.

“Enjoying my wedding gift, Frank?” The voice asked.

“You?” My mouth had gone so dry my voice cracked.

“Me.”

My eyes adjusted to the dimness. The walls of the cell were gone, replaced by a plain of living flagstones that receded into the darkness, broken only by veiny stalactites vanishing upward into more darkness. I looked down at myself and I was no longer wearing Snake/Bartholomew's skin. I stood in the long-dead body of Frank Blackthorne, just as I had the last time I stood before this red-tinted landscape of pulsing pillars and flagstones made of eyes, teeth, and oddly placed fingers.

I looked back up because the floor was staring at me.

I turned around, and faced the handsome figure of a man sitting on a throne of bone and sinew.

The Dark Lord Nâtlac said, “Boo.”

He appeared just as I remembered him, much as I'd tried to forget. He wore the perfect form of a man, perfect enough that looking at him caused an itch in the back of the eyes that told you that what you saw and what was really there were two very different things. He still wore a midnight black cloak whose stitched leather bore the outlines of human faces, faces whose lips twitched against the stitching binding them closed, and whose eyes moved behind eyelids that had been sewn shut.

“You planned this,” I said when I could find my voice again.

“Oh, far from it.” He chuckled with a sound like someone sprinkling tiny splinters of broken glass into my ears. “You
earned
that token. But it is only what it is. Your own snarled fate led you here.”

“So you're here to gloat?”

“No, Frank. The rituals to consecrate sacrifices in my name brought you all into my presence.”

“‘You all?'”

He gestured and I saw we weren't alone. I saw a huddled form and involuntarily snapped, “What are you doing to her?”

“Nothing, Frank. They are not yet mine. What they bring here now, as with you, is solely their own.”

I ran to the cowering body. It was Rabbit. She seemed smaller and less gaunt, but I recognized her face as she huddled shivering against the cobblestones. I bent down and touched her bare shoulder and she winced.

“Daddy, please, no,” she whispered, and the sound of her voice was so unexpected that I jerked my hand away.

“Rabbit?”

“Please,” she sobbed. “No.”

“She may be here.” Nâtlac's voice burrowed into my ears. “But what she sees is what she brought with her. Your privileged history with me allows you to see partly through the veil.”

“But she's a mute,” I said.

“And what are you?”

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. If I strode here in my original body, a body that had been worm food for months, of course poor Rabbit could regain her tongue. But, as I watched her cower, naked, from her invisible father, I couldn't think the return of her speech was worth it.

Several steps away Laya sat on the ground, legs crossed. She appeared mostly as I remembered, except for the blood covering her hands and arms, and the scar on her face was a fresh wound. “Laya? Are you all right?”

She didn't respond. She stared glassy-eyed into a pile of shiny entrails heaped in her lap.

Even though I knew what I saw was some sort of illusion, I shouted,
“Laya?”
afraid that she'd been disemboweled.

She hadn't.

I saw, though she was about the same age as the Laya I knew, she was much more gaunt—starvation-thin, showing the edges of her skull and the knobs on her wrist as she slowly brought a bloody flap of meat from the pile on her lap up to her lips. I turned away as she opened a ghoulish mouth of red-stained teeth and began to chew.

My own nightmares are sort of tame,
I thought.

“Hello, have you seen my daddy?” I spun around and saw a small boy, maybe about five years old, dressed in crusty rags. His face was smeared with filth except where tears had washed stripes of white against the skin.

“I lost my daddy.”

The boy didn't wait for an answer. He turned away from me and wandered off, asking the darkness, “Have you seen my daddy? Where's my daddy?”

It took me a moment before I realized I was watching a much younger Krys.
“She's been homeless since she was six and the Delmark watch took her dad to the dungeons.”
I watched her disappear into the darkness.

“Why put them through this?”

His laugh sliced through my skull. “Suffering needs no reason. It just
is
. I find it admirable.”

“Admirable?”

“Each soul is unique in its particular pain. There is beauty in it.”

A baby cried in the darkness and I ran toward it. When I came upon her, the tiny body was blue, cold, and stiff. I recognized the strawberry-blond curls plastered against her scalp. “Thea?”

“I turn away no offerings. And children can bear so much more before they're broken.”

I placed a hand on the cold body, and it sucked in a breath and began screaming bloody murder again. The skin was suddenly warm and pink. “What?”

“You're walking through their dreams, their fears, their pain. They honor you by presenting their wounds.”

I didn't feel honored.

I glanced up as I touched the infant Thea and I could see another scene dimly through the low red light, woods that seemed familiar. “But . . . they said she was abandoned in the woods . . . she would have been nine or ten.”

“The little one was abandoned long before her family left her in the woods.”

The baby stopped crying. The skin had gone cold again.

I shook my head. “I don't want to see any more.”

“Yes,” Nâtlac said, his words burrowing into my brain like a thousand hungry beetles. “You do.”

I turned to look at the Dark Lord, and his smile was a knife slash across my eyes. I looked away, and baby Thea was gone, replaced by Mary, equally naked. She lay on her back, staring upward, not seeing me. Her body was roped with bruises, and blood stained her legs.

“No,” I said, closing my eyes. “I don't want to see this.”

I started getting to my feet, and something grabbed my wrist. My eyes shot open and I was looking directly into Mary's staring eyes. Nâtlac's realm was gone, replaced by a shabby room with a bed and a few sticks of furniture. Mary stared into my eyes, but somehow I also saw the scene from outside myself as well. I wasn't myself or Snake, I was someone else with shaggy gray hair growing everywhere but my scalp. Mary had sprung from the bed and had grabbed my/his wrist.

“You like it rough?” she whispered.

I/he tried to pull my/his arm away, and Mary's other hand came down, clawing at my/his eyes. My own eyes burned as I watched the stranger scream and cover his bloody face. He tried to block her, but she leaped on him. Despite the fact she was little more than half his size, he was slow and blinded and wasn't able to block it as she sank her teeth into the side of his face, coming away with pieces of his ear and cheek.

He threw her off of him and stumbled for the door.

That just gave her the chance to find a weapon.

He collapsed to his knees as a chair splintered across his back. He tried to get up and a splintered chair leg stabbed into the soft part of his back above the right kidney.

He bellowed, and Mary spat at him. “Rough? You like it rough?”

She pulled the chair leg out and stabbed him with it again, and again, and a third time before the wood broke off in the wound. I watched as she kept beating him, venting years of rage and anger in a few minutes. When it was done, she was as bloody as the corpse smeared on the ground, and most of the blood wasn't hers.

I backed away at the same time I realized I could back away.

Nâtlac's realm reasserted itself, and it was almost a relief.

Part of me wondered what was different about that guy, how awful he must have been to trigger that response. Another part of me knew that the only thing that marked him from any of the others the White Rock Thieves' Guild had given Mary to was the fact he was the
last
one.

I already felt a few qualms about how I had spent the first night in Snake's body. Now those qualms had blossomed into a full-blown self-loathing. Sure, I had
assumed
that I had been dealing with a willing businesswoman, but did I
know
? When I'd had to deal with a guild in the past, I know quite a number of my jobs had been less than voluntary . . .

Of all the times before, when I'd paid for my companionship, how many times had it been coerced?

And why had I waited until now to care?

“That's enough,” I whispered.

“No, there are two more.”

Mary disappeared, and I asked, “
Two
more?”

“No, I didn't mean this . . .” I turned toward the new voice, and saw Grace, Fearless Leader, on her knees, shaking her head. Unlike the others, her appearance in the world of nightmares hadn't changed. Body and clothing were pretty much as I had last seen her.

But her attitude . . .

Grace seemed to have collapsed inside herself. I had seen some stress fractures in her commanding demeanor here and there as she struggled to keep rein on her little band. What I saw now was a complete collapse of the mask she wore. She shook as she wept uncontrollably.

I walked up to her, and she seemed tiny and much younger, kneeling on the ground. I reached out and touched her shoulder—

—she peered in through a window at a quartet of black-clad thugs. A woman was obviously dead at their feet, a pool of blood spreading beneath her. They held another man down on his knees, knife to his throat. One of the thugs asked, “Where's the brat you been givin' our secrets to?”

Another chimed in. “Give her up, we may just hurt you some.”

Next to me, Grace whispered, “Father, don't.”

The man on his knees moved only his eyes to look directly at us. He may have smiled slightly before he raised his head and spat in the face of the lead thug.

They slit his throat without any ceremony.

Grace gasped as his body fell face first onto the floor next to his wife. I squeezed her shoulder, but I wasn't really part of this vision, and she ignored me. She shook her head, sucking in breathless sobs and saying near silent words.

“Not . . . my . . . fault . . .”

Then her breath caught. I saw her eyes widen and the color drain from her face, and I turned to look at what new horror she was seeing.

“Oh no, Grace,” I whispered, “don't do this to yourself.”

The window was gone, and we faced a blasted plain under a moonless night sky. Five bodies were strewn in the mud, bodies broken, sightless eyes staring at the endless blackness above us. Mary, Laya, Krys, Rabbit, Thea . . .

“This hasn't happened,” I told her.

But I wasn't there, and she just kept shaking her head. “Not my fault.”

I let go of her shoulder. “She shouldn't have to bear that weight.”

“It is her weight to bear, Frank.” I winced at the Dark Lord's voice.

“Why are you showing me this?”

“I am not showing you anything. These are their secrets to reveal.”

I got slowly to my feet.

“One more, Frank.”

“That was all the girls. There's no one left.”

“No. There is one more sacrifice. Someone you want to meet.”

“Who?” I said, even as a shadow coalesced out of the darkness, forming into an armored figure kneeling in supplication. The plate mail shone despite the dark ruddy light, the cascade of blond hair only slightly less so.

For several moments I stared, unbelieving.

“You must be kidding.”

Unlike the others, this apparition heard me.

Sir Forsythe the Good turned to face me and smiled. “My Liege! The Dark Lord has truly answered my prayers.”