Dragon Venom (Obsidian Chronicles Book 3) (8 page)

Arlian blinked. "What?"

"I had heard that the dragons had laid waste your family's estate, and that you had taken the last of the ancestral money and parleyed it into a vast fortune so that you might avenge this loss. But if there were no estates..."

"True, the dragons killed my family—and that was quite enough to earn my hatred. Our 'estate' was a modest house in a mountain village, where I hid in the cellars while the dragons burned the town and its inhabitants to ash. The looters who combed through the ruins sold me into slavery; I escaped, and sought revenge."

"And swore to kill all the dragons?"

"Yes."

"But they didn't all attack your village."

"Three of them did. The others have slain innocents enough elsewhere."

"But how do you know that?"

"What?"

"Well, dragons are surely not all exactly the same—how do you know that all of them are killers? Perhaps a few evil individuals are responsible for all the attacks."

"No. They are all monsters."

"But how can you be sure of that? They are born of men's hearts, aid men's hearts are not all of one sort."

Arlian sighed. "Men are not dragons," he said.

"Yet surely, you do not argue that all dragons behave identically!"

"No. There is variation among dragons, as among men—though not, I would say, as much variation."

"Perhaps—or perhaps they are just as individual as we, with a wide range of personalities. Perhaps there are dragons lurking in the earth beneath us who are as beneficent and kind as anyone could ask."

"It seems rather unlikely."

"But what if there are? Have you not sworn to exterminate the entire species?"

"I did," Arlian agreed.

"And for fourteen years, you have been hunting down dragons and killing them, regardless of whether you knew them to be ruthless murderers or not."

"Ah, but there you err," Arlian said. He pointed to a small locked chest in the body of the wagon. "You forget that the only means we have of locating dragons in their lairs is by following the descriptions and hints in the old records that Lord Wither and the Dragon Society compiled. For more than six hundred years the Society noted every report, every sighting, and Lord Wither collected and organized and preserved those notes. It is those records we use to find their caverns—

and for every one of those sightings and reports, the dragons that were seen attacked some human community and slaughtered dozens or hundreds of innocents. Any dragon we find is a killer, beyond question. If there are draconic innocents, we have no way of knowing it, and no way of finding them. And frankly, my lord, I doubt any exist. I think it is inherent in the very nature of dragons to amuse themselves every so often by killing people; certainly they have done so for each of the past fourteen summers, and hundreds of men, women, and children have died as a result."

"You declared war on them! You have been butchering their fellows as they sleep! How could they not fight back?"

"But they do not attack Manfort, or the towns I have fortified; they invariably choose undefended villages, where they can slaughter freely.

They do not kill for any strategic or tactical purpose, but only because thev delight in inflicting suffering and death."

"Or perhaps merely because they are hungry, my lord?"

Arlian shook his head. "They do not eat human flesh, my lord."

That startled Rolinor. "Do they not?"

"No. They do not. The occasional reports of half-eaten bodies are the result of corpses partially dissolved by venom. Dragons are creatures of pure magic, and require no material sustenance. They kill because they choose to kill, because they take pleasure in it."

"Perhaps they can be convinced not to, then!"

"Lord Enziet thought so. For centuries he bound them to a bargain, and their end of it required them not to harm humans—yet still, every few years, every decade or two, a village would be destroyed. They simply could not resist the temptation. This, to me, is an evil worthy of obliteration."

"If all of them do this, perhaps."

"All we have ever seen have done it."

"But perhaps there are some we have never seen, lurking deep in the earth, who do not yield to this temptation!"

"And if there are, we shall never find them, and therefore shall never harm them."

"Yet you still will not allow men to become dragonhearts."

"Ah! I was beginning to wonder why you chose to defend our ancient foes. You like the thought of a thousand years of life, and then giving birth to a benign creature, rather than an abomination, upon your death."

"Well—yes."

Arlian shook his head. "I do not believe in your benign dragons. All I have ever seen of them has been destruction, pain, and evil. I believe it to be their very nature."

"I am not entirely convinced, my lord."

"That does not particularly concern me."

"The dragons drove the old wild magic, the wizards and demons and monsters, from the Lands of Man—surely that was a beneficent act!"

"First, if that did in fact occur, it was thousands upon thousands of years ago, and anything we know of it is probably so garbled as to bear little resemblance to the truth. I would note that you attribute this to the dragons, as I suppose your parents taught you, while I was taught that it was the gods who drove out chaos before they died. Second, I would suppose the dragons did so, if they did, to remove any challenges to their own rule, and not out of any sort of altruism."

"Nonetheless, it was a benefit to humanity."

"If it happened, yes, it unquestionably was—the lands beyond the border are hellish chaos, and we are all blessed to be natives of the Lands of Man, rather than slaves in Tirikindaro or clansmen cowering behind iron and silver wards in Arithei. Even so, I hardly think that balances out the dragons' evil."

Rolinor had no immediate answer to that, and Arlian took the

opportunity to move to the driver's bench, beside Black, and inquire about the road and the weather. That bench only seated two, leaving Rolinor to his own devices.

They camped by the roadside that night, and Rolinor wearied

Arlian with further explication of how the dragons might actually be a benefit to humanity, and suggestions of how the Duke might choose his court more wisely by paying more attention to ancestry and less to charming words. Arlian, pleading fatigue, retired early.

The next day was no better, but there was no escape in the cramped space of the single wagon. Thrust irrevocably together as they were, Arlian quickly grew inexpressibly tired of Rolinor's company; by the third day of the journey he fervently wished they had brought a second wagon so that he could avoid conversation. By the time they reached Westguard, almost a month later, spring had washed away the snow and Arlian's boredom had washed away all interest in keeping an eye on the younger man, or worrying about any further attempts Rolinor might make to obtain dragon venom.

He tried to convince himself that since Rolinor had behaved himself on the journey and showed no untoward interest in dragon venom, he had demonstrated that he could be trusted to continue unsupervised.

The truth was that Arlian was thoroughly sick of Rolinor's arrogance, his wishful theorizing about the nature of dragons, and his obsession with the minutiae of genealogy and court intrigue; he wanted to be rid of the youth.

Accordingly, as they rode through a cold drizzle past the ranked wooden catapults into Westguard, he said, "I want to stop in at an inn I own, my lord, and inspect the books, and I'm sure you would prefer not to delay; why don't you go on ahead to Manfort, and let His Grace know we're on our way, and that we left the others in Ethinior?

Although we have no horse for you, the walk is easy enough, and the rain has melted the snow and ice from the road."

"I would be delighted to oblige you, my lord," Rolinor replied, with a bow; he appeared genuinely pleased, and Arlian wondered whether the youth was as weary of Arlian as Arlian was of him.

When Black brought the wagon to a stop Rolinor was in the back, collecting his belongings; a moment later Arlian helped him climb down and settle his packs in place. Then, with a final wave, the young nobleman marched off to the east, heedless of the thin rain.

Arlian watched him go, then muttered to Black, "I have rarely been so glad to see someone's back receding."

"While I would not ordinarily seek out his company, it would seem I find him less aggravating than do you," Black remarked, as the two men walked, hunched against the cold and damp, toward the now-badly-misnamed New Inn. Arlian had bought a new plume for his hat in Ethinior, but he had removed the feather before debarking and left it in the wagon rather than let the foul weather ruin it; with that gone, and his cloak pulled tightly about him, he was, like his companion, wrapped in black from head to toe.

"When he is not trying to convince me to spare a few dragons, he talks of little but the foolish power games in Manfort!" Arlian protested.

"I can think of nothing more wearisome."

"Ah, he is obsessed," Black said, "just as you are. And the conflict lies in the simple fact that you are obsessed with different things."

"And if this is true, and an unshared obsession is as wearisome for you as for me, then how can you tolerate either of us?"

"Oh, easily—I am not obsessed, but I take an interest in both his obsession and your own. More importantly, though, I simply do not listen much of the time. I have learned to give the appearance of polite attention while in truth I'm remembering what I had for supper the night before, or what Brook told me on our wedding night, or some other unrelated matter."

"You always listen," Arlian said. "You remember every word spoken within a hundred yards of your ears, I swear it!"

"I hear every word, and I remember those I think might prove important, but I do not listen. It's a useful technique."

"You must teach it to me someday."

"Perhaps I will, when you are sufficiently free of your own obses-sions to learn it."

And then they were at the door of the inn; Black swung open the unlocked door, and as Arlian stepped in his attention focused on business, and on getting warm and dry for a time.

A Debatable Homecoming

7

A Debatable Homecoming

They reached Manfort late the following morning, passing unnoticed through the city gates; Arlian observed that the iron-framed catapults on the city ramparts appeared fully crewed, and were loaded with obsidian-tipped missiles, despite the lingering chill in the air.

The wagon rolled up the stone-paved, rain-drenched streets to the Upper City, where the city's nobility had built their mansions and palaces. The sun was peeking through thinning clouds, almost directly overhead, when Black and Arlian pulled up at the entrance to the Grey House.

Most of the homes of the lords and ladies of Manfort were grand edifices of wood and stone and glass and plaster, with broad windows and tidy lawns; the Grey House, however, had been built eight centuries ago, in the days of the Man-Dragon Wars, and resembled a fortress more than a palace. Its windows were few and narrow, its yards and courts entirely paved with gray stone; its every exposed surface was smoke-blackened stone or dark, heavy tile. Wood and thatch and green-ery could burn when dragonfire splashed across the city, so the Grey House had none visible; even the exterior doors were sheathed in metal.

Arlian would not have chosen so forbidding an edifice as his home, but he had inherited this one from the late Lord Enziet—his sworn enemy who had nonetheless left Arlian all his worldly possessions, apparently in the belief that his foe could make better use of them than any of his surviving allies.

When he had first come to Manfort in his guise as the wealthy Lord Obsidian, Arlian had made a point of buying the most ostentatious housing available; he had lived for some time in the Old Palace, a former home of the Dukes of Manfort—but the Old Palace had been

destroyed by fire, and Arlian had been left with the Grey House as his only residence in the city. He spent so little time in Manfort that he saw no point in replacing it with a more pleasant abode.

Arlian swung himself down from the wagon on one side while Black dismounted from the other; together they marched up to the door, but then Arlian had to stand and wait while Black found the right key and unlocked the forbidding iron gate.

Arlian looked around, puzzled.

"I thought there would be a guardsman here," he said.

The lock clicked, and Black looked up. "Why?" he asked.

"To let the Duke know we've arrived. Rolinor must have told him we were coming; I had half expected to find an escort waiting for us at the city gate, to fetch us to the Citadel."

Black held the gate open as Arlian stepped through. "Why would the Duke be in such a hurry as that?"

"I would think he would be eager for the latest news of our campaign."

"He has undoubtedly heard the latest news of our campaign," Black pointed out. "Rolinor has an active tongue."

"A good point," Arlian conceded. "Still, I am the Duke's warlord, and I would have thought that my arrival would command a certain level of ceremony."

"And I expect you'll have it—just not immediately."

They had reached the door of the house itself, and Black had found the appropriate key, but before he could apply it to the lock the door swung inward.

A thin, white-haired figure in Obsidian's black-and-white livery stood there, bowing deeply. "Welcome home, my lord," he said.

"Thank you, Ferrezin," Arlian replied, removing his hat. "It's good to be here."

Ferrezin started, then blinked. "Ah, Lord Obsidian," he said. "Do you know, for a moment I took you for Lord Enziet?"

Arlian froze in midstride and stared at the old man.

"Enziet's dead," he said at last. "Dead these what, sixteen years?

Seventeen?"

"Of course, my lord, of course. I know that. But I served him twenty years as his steward, and lived forty years before that as his slave, like my mother before me, and in all those sixty years Lord Enziet never aged a day, and I did not see him die, nor did I see his body. I know in my mind that he died long ago in a cave beneath the Desolation, as you and Black and Lord Enziet's own sorcery told me as much, but my heart is not yet convinced, and I often find myself expecting to see him around the next corner, or stepping through the gate."