Authors: Elizabeth A. Lynn
“But he said nothing, only held me with his eyes. I sat trembling.
“Then he said, And so I will continue to be. But you must promise me a thing, Lorimir Ness. You must swear to serve my sons when I die.
“I made that promise. I could not do otherwise. Within seven months he was dead. I wondered later if he had had some foreknowledge of his death. He could have killed me: he was my lord, and I had betrayed his trust, and broken my oath. But he only smiled like a sword, and dismissed me.”
Lorimir’s face was wet; he wiped it with a gloved hand, glad that after all these years he could still weep for Hana. “Excuse me, my lord,” he said, rising. Without waiting to be dismissed, he stepped from the tent.
Within the fastness of the Citadel, Hawk leaned against the bars of her prison, and waited for the dawn.
She was uncertain how long she had been there. There was no natural light in the room, only the flickering wer-light; it, and the pain from her head and arm, confounded her senses. Her broken arm throbbed painfully. From shoulder to elbow it was swollen and hot. She had tried to fashion a sling from her cloak, so that at least it did not dangle, but had not been able to manage it. She had heard Karadur’s mind, searching for her through the storm: but the poisonous miasma of spite that filled every cranny of the Citadel would not allow her to answer him. She had half- slept, and dreamed, hideous tormenting dreams, from which she had awakened sick and shaking. Some time ago a skinny man in rags, probably a slave, had brought her a cup filled with water, and a hunk of dry brown bread. She forced herself to eat it.
“Is it day or night?” she asked him.
He shrugged, and opened his mouth to show the mutilated stump of his tongue.
“Did Gorthas do that?” she asked. “There’s an army outside this castle. Gorthas will be dead soon.” He looked at her with disbelieving eyes, and then backed from her as if her words were dangerous. The wer-light made her head ache. She shielded her eyes from it. For a moment desperation threatened to overwhelm her. She could not change.
She could not change.
Methodically she felt along the icy bars with her good hand, from where they joined the frozen ground to as high as she could reach. They seemed solid. She kicked at the place she had seen the cage door open, but the blows had no effect, and the jar against her injured arm made her head spin. She yearned for a pry bar, even a stout stick.
An image rose in her thought: Bear. She saw him, hairy, huge, vengeful, crouched in the shelter of a jagged stone, watching the castle. Truth or illusion? She did not know.
Bear, I am here,
she sent into the waning night
... I am here. Come and find me.
He did not answer. Wolf would have answered; Wolf would have heard her. But Bear had not heard, could not hear her, and Wolf was dead. She leaned against the bars, fighting hopelessness.
From a pain-filled drowse she heard the tramp of boots, and jerked awake.
Gorthas leered outside the cage. “Good morning, cousin,” he said.
The door opened, and three men dragged her out. She elbowed one in the throat and kicked another in the knee, tumbling him cursing to the floor, but then they had her. Gorthas’s hideous face gleamed with an evil joy. One of the men was smiling too, but the others moved like automatons as they half-carried, half-dragged her to the chamber with the throne.
The worm swayed in the strange half-light. Shem lay curled on a filthy blanket at the foot of the icy chair. Gorthas said, “My lord, I have brought the changeling as you commanded.”
“Excellent,” the serpent said. “Resstrain her.” Its features seemed to shift and change: from someone young, fair- skinned, with pale blue eyes, to someone else, something else, something barely human, and old, horribly old.
The men looped coils of rope around her legs and arms and chest and tied her to a pillar. She smelled smoke.
“Ssso,” the worm hissed. “Do you fear pain, little bird?” She saw the brazier heaped with coals, and the heating skewers. “You cannot escape. Do not think your commander will rescue you. He believes you are a traitor. He believes that you deserted him, as his friend Azil, his dear, treacherous friend, deserted him.”
Rancor dripped like acid against the walls of her mind. The worm threw its protean head back, hissing with grotesque laughter.
“Bear,” it said, “Bear, come and find me. Your friend Bear cannot hear you, little bird. He lies in the sssnow, bleeding, with an arrow in his gutsss.”
“You lie,” Hawk said.
“How do you know?” said the worm. “You cannot know. Your power is gone, little bird. I ate it.” It yawned, showing her its crimson gullet. “Do it,” it said to Gorthas.
Gorthas picked up a pair of gloves. “My lord, shall I take both eyes?”
“No,” the worm said. It arched over her. “Not yet. Take just one. Do it ssslowly.”
“Hold her head,” Gorthas said to the soldiers. They wound their hands in her hair and slammed her head back against the pillar. Gorthas twirled a skewer in the coals, then lifted it. Hawk felt the heat on her cheek. She struggled savagely to turn her head, to rip her own hair out by its roots. The men only gripped more tightly.
“Scream, cousin,” Gorthas rasped. “They say it helps, if you scream.”
The blunt, glowing point, a piercing spark of agony, teased her right eyelid,, and withdrew. And again. And again.
Her mind was screaming, but she would not scream.
She did not scream, as the red-hot skewer seared bit by slow bit through her eyelid and into her eye.
21
Before dawn, Bear Inisson stood in a hollow against the western wall of the castle.
A narrow wooden door barred his way inside. The lock housing was broken, and the upper hinge was loose. The wall which from a distance had appeared so massive was flimsy as a wooden fence. Friable as sandstone, it crumbled under his hands.
On the other side of the door, a man was standing guard. Bear had heard his footsteps, and then his snores. No sentries walked the battlements. Ravens roosting on the towers slept, heads tucked under wings. Far aloft, at an unimaginable distance, the stars wrought intricate designs across the face of night.
Bear scraped the sharpened tip of his cudgel softly, rhythmically, over the door planks. The snores stopped. Bear waited. The door opened. Bear waited. It opened wider. Moving into the door’s mouth, the man peered into the boundless darkness. Mercilessly, Bear rammed the butt of the cudgel into the guard’s chest and just as ruthlessly into his face. He doubled soundlessly to the ground. Stepping inside, Bear closed the useless door. The passageway was barely tall enough for his head. A sickly greenish light made a patchwork lattice along the rough cold walls.
Somewhere a man’s voice grumbled, but the words bounced off the walls, so distorted that he could not tell from where they came, or even how many men were speaking. Rage drove through him like lust. He hated them. He wanted to hunt them, to surprise them and kill them, one after the other. But he had come for the wizard. Gripping his cudgel, Bear glided in a predator’s soundless stalk along the narrow, fetid corridor..
Behind him, the guard, eyes bulging, lay strangling on his own blood.
The war band roused before dawn.
Azil sat solitary in his tent. The candle had long since burned out: the enclosure was chill and lightless. The camp woke. Horses whickered; sledges hissed and bumped along the frozen ground. Swords rattled in their sheaths. He smelled woodsmoke, and the excrement of horse and mule and men, and his own stink.
His fingers ached; they were locked with cramp. He closed and opened them until they worked. He had sat all night in his clothes. He had not dreamed; but then, he had not slept.
Olav and Irok came to get him. Olav helped him with his boots. They brought him water with which to wash, and escorted him to the latrine. The sky was pearl-grey, like the inside of a shell. A quicksilver line of light trembled on the eastern horizon. He noted, with detached amusement, who among the men he passed looked at him, and who would not, and what their faces said. As he returned to the center of the camp, he heard the beat of wings. A white shape wheeled overhead. He wondered if the mage had spent the night in eagle-shape, and if so, where she had slept. There were no trees, no cliffs to roost upon. But a mage could take any form. She could have been a stone, or fire, or the wind itself.
“I would like some light,” he said. They brought him a candle, and then, though he not asked for it, a brazier. He stood over the heat. Then he heard the step he had been waiting for, and a deep voice, and turned. The tent flap parted. The candle flared.
Karadur had bound his hair with a gold cord. His sword hung down his back. He was wearing a chain-mail shirt; the steel rings glittered beneath his dark cloak.
“I dismissed the guards,” he said. “You are free to go where you wish.” He held something out. Instinctively Azil took it.
It was his knife.
His throat was dry as dust. Now when he most needed it, his voice had deserted him. “Thank you,” he managed. He slid the knife into his shirt. And then, because some things had to be said, he asked, “Am I to be punished?”
“For dreaming?” said the dragon-lord. He moved nearer the light, and Azil could see, by the deep grooves in his face, that Karadur had not slept either. He wondered if anyone had.
Four steps separated them. Only four steps.
Lorimir Ness spoke from the other side of the tent. “My lord, it’s almost time.”
“A moment,” the dragon-lord said. He took one step forward. The candlelight fell fully on his face. “Azil. I never asked you. I may not have a chance to, later. You knew, years ago, how much my brother hated me.
Why did you agree to help him?
”
Azil said, “He told me that you were in danger. He said”—it was amazingly difficult to say the words—”that before you took the form you should sire children, to safeguard the line.”
Astonishingly, he saw the dragon-lord’s brief half-smile. “Yes. He told me that, too. He was probably right. Was there more?”
He did not want to say it. But it would be dawn soon; the army was waiting. The thing in the castle, the consumed, degraded being that had been Tenjiro Atani, might win the coming battle. They might never speak again.
He answered, through the thunder of his own heartbeat, “Tenjiro said that you would change. That once you took the form, you would change so much that I would not know you, nor you me. He said you might go mad, like the Black Dragon; that you might fly into the sun, like the dragon-king Lyr. I believed him.”
The dragon-lord bowed his head. Then he said levelly, “Had I known you were alive, I would have come to find you.” The candle flared, lighting his face. There were tears on his cheeks. “He said to me, when he left:
I will punish him for you. I will care for him with the exact tenderness that you have used toward me.
I thought you were dead.”
Azil said, “I knew that.”
“I would know you from the heart of the sun. I would know you even if I were mad. I will know you always, whatever form I wear. I swear it.”
“My lord,” Lorimir called again.
Understanding, like a breaking wave, swept suddenly across Karadur’s face. “Your hands—it was Tenjiro who crippled them. Not Gorthas.” Azil nodded. “He wanted to destroy your music. Why would he do that?”
“I think—revenge. He so wanted me to speak to him— to beg, to ask for mercy. I would not.”
“Not at all?”
“I did not speak for three years. It was all I could do.”
“Tell me.”
He could not tell the story standing. He sat, and locked his hands together, so they would not shake. “The second time I escaped from Mitligund, I was very weak. I didn’t get very far from the castle. The wargs found me, and held me, until men came from the castle, and dragged me inside.
“Gorthas was waiting for me. This time he did not beat me. Instead, he told me he would blind me. He described how an eyeball sizzles and melts when hot iron bores into it. The men tied me to a pillar, and brought a brazier, and iron skewers. He heated them in front of me, until they were red-hot.
“Then Tenjiro came, and stopped it. He said I was a fool; if I were to enter your domain you would hunt me like an animal. He said he would show me what Dragon’s justice was like. He went away, and came back with the black box. Your talisman lay in it; it was unchanged, brilliant, hot as a star. I thought it would be dulled, but it was not. He told Gorthas to free my hands, and ordered me to lift it from the box. I tried not to obey. My hands moved anyway. It burned. He would not permit me to lose consciousness. He made me hold the band in both hands, until it seared flesh to bone, and then ate the bone. Ultimately I could not grip it, or anything. Gorthas put me back in the cage.”
Outside the tent, the men were waiting. Derry stood in front of Karadur’s tent. He hugged a beaked helmet of gilded, polished steel. The side guards of the helmet were fashioned to resemble wings. Rogys led the black gelding to his master’s side. Smoke wore thick leather pads at chest and cheeks. His harness had been burnished till it shone. The men assembled as they had the day before, in crescent formation, officers in the center. Karadur brought Smoke to face them.