Authors: Elizabeth A. Lynn
At last, when the dust had come to rest, Herugin and Orm lifted Tenjiro Atani’s wasted body out of the dry, parchment-like coils of the worm’s epidermis, laid it on a litter of crossed poles, and bore it across the slag-heaps to the camp. The dragon, its sail-like wings stiffening in the brightening day, lay where it had fallen.
At Lorimir’s order, the men, in groups of three or four, combed through the fallen stones. The sun climbed higher in the pale blue sky.
After an hour, Murgain limped to where Karadur was sitting beside the physician’s tent. “My lord, we have been twice through the ruins. We have found no sign of Gorthas or Shem.”
“What have you found?”
“Dust,” Murgain said. “Bodies: they were trapped in corridors when the walls fell. None of them is Gorthas, or Shem. Rusted cooking pots, a brazier, a shattered knife, a wooden bowl—we have a small pile of such things. No black box.”
“Show me,” Karadur said grimly.
Murgain brought him to where they had laid out what had come from the wreckage. He said, “We can widen our search to the land beyond the castle. There must be half a hundred holes and ditches, maybe even tunnels, where a patient man might lie hidden.”
A worn triple-thonged whip lay on top of the meager pile. Frowning, the dragon-lord flung it violently across the ground. Rogys appeared at his elbow. “My lord,” he said breathlessly, “we’ve found something. We don’t know what it is.”
It was a column of mist: a white, hovering, opaque mist.
It twisted in the sunlight, leaping and falling and rising again in a slow serpentine pattern.
Rogys said, “Byrnik found it, my lord. He touched it, and look.” Byrnik extended both hands. His palms were white and blistered.
Karadur knelt, and passed a hand through the swirling mist. “It’s ice-cold,” he said softly. “Cold as the heart of the Void... Ruil, find the mage. Ask her to come here.” Ruil raced off. “Byrnik, let Macallan see to your hands.”
“Yes, my lord, I will,” said Byrnik. But he did not move.
Senmet of Mako came up to them.
Karadur said, “Wizard, do you know what this is?”
The mage leaned thoughtfully on her staff. “I know what it looks like.”
“It is immeasurably cold,” Karadur said. “Colder than it can be, and still be vapor, not snow or sleet or ice. No natural fog can be this cold.”
“I see,” the wizard said. “Well...” She pointed her staff at the mist, and spoke. Nothing happened. She repeated it. The mist thickened. “No. That’s not what I want to do,” she muttered. “Ah.” She aimed the staff again.
“Let all objects and beings seen and unseen now manifest and be made visible...”
Like snow-spume blown by a playful wind, the white mist blew away. A small black box lay in a hollow of earth. Karadur knelt, and rose with the box in one hand. He thumbed the lid back. A white radiance burst from the cavity. He turned the box, and held it upside-down.
The dragon armband slid into his cupped palm.
22
Karadur’s fingers closed lightly on the glittering armband. The lines of weariness and strain smoothed from his face; it seemed to fill with wonder. Ruil bent to pick up the box. “Leave it,” Karadur said sharply. The boy stepped back. “Would you take it?” the dragon-lord said to the mage.
“I will, my lord Dragon.” She touched his arm, and pointed southward. “Go that way,” she suggested. “You’ll need the space.”
He did, winding his way past ditches and gravel-pits and heaps of piled stones. The land dipped slightly: he disappeared, then reappeared. Finally he stopped. Rogys said, “What is it? What is he doing?”
“Watch,” said the mage.
A crystalline dazzle shimmered like a curtain across the face of day.
When it dissipated, the man was gone. The dragon towered over them. His sleek, diamond-shaped scales gleamed like molten gold in the sunlight. Barbed spikes, delicate as feathers, formed his mane. He was immense: lean and long, over fifty feet from graceful arching head to the barb on the end of his whiplike spiky tail. Opening his fanged mouth, he roared, a crackling throaty trumpet of triumph and power. His wings unfolded like fans.
Muscles bunching, he leaped aloft. The great wings beat, and caught the air. He circled once above them, and cried a second time. Then, with prodigious grace, the sinuous body straightened and sped like an arrow shaft, straight toward the sun.
The horses, not surprisingly, went mad.
Plunging and thrashing, they snapped their leather tethers like bits of straw. Stakes, pulled wholly from their mooring, hobbled and clattered along the ground. Those not tethered simply ran, carrying hapless riders with them. Even the mules, who had been chosen for endurance and sturdiness of temperament, fought their pickets and charged in different directions, taking with them whatever gear they carried. Herugin Dol sank to his knees and hid his face in both hands, shaking. Orm bent over him.
“Vaikenneii’s balls! You all right?”
The dark-haired officer lifted his head. He was laughing, through tears. “Yes. Oh gods. It will take us hours to get them back.”
Orm stared at him, and shook his head. “Sandor!” he shouted. “Take the captain somewhere he .can sit down.” He pointed to where Hawk of Ujo rested on a pallet. Azil Aumson was with her. Sandor obeyed. As he lowered Herugin to the ground beside the injured archer, a string of frantic horses galloped past them. Herugin was paper-white. Sandor pressed the wineskin into Herugin £ hands. The cavalry master raised the skin. He had to do it twice: half his first attempt went down his shirt. But the second attempt succeeded: color returned to his face, and his shakes diminished.
“Sorry,” he said.
“Nothing to be sorry about,” said Bear, looming suddenly over the pallet. He grinned, and clapped Herugin gently on the shoulder. “That sound—if I were a horse I’d have run, too.
“I saw his father,” he said unexpectedly. “Kojiro the Black. I was roaming through the Nakase hills in summer, near, to Yarrow, heading for a little vineyard I know of, when he flew over my head, flying low. It must have been twenty-four, twenty-five years ago. He was jet-black, except for a scarlet crest that ran between his eyes and over his head, and part way down his back. He spoke to me. He said,
Well met, cousin Bear. How goes the hunting?
And I called back, not aloud, but in the way changelings can sometimes speak to each other,
It goes well enough, cousin. And yours?
He didn’t answer, but he laughed, the way a thunderstorm might laugh, if it could. It rang in my head for days.”
The slow steady voice had brought a measure of calm to Herugin’s face.
“Yes,” he said ruefully. “It felt like that. Like thunder tearing through my head.” He lifted the wineskin to his lips and drank a long draught. “I was eleven when Kojiro Atani burned Mako to the ground. I remember white rain falling, and burning in the air, and my mother’s terror. But I don’t remember the dragon.” He squared his shoulders, and got to his feet. “I’d better get to work,” he said.
Bear watched him walk away. “Your Dragon has some good men about him,” he commented.
“
He’ll
be all right. He’s stretched a bit tight, that’s all.”
Hawk sat slowly up. Macallan had bound her arm to her side, and contrived a patch for the exposed, raw eye socket. She stared into the azure sky.
“I hate him,” she said harshly.
“Who?” Azil said. His eyes stung with the dust.
“Your Dragon.”
Huw the archer trotted up to them. He was dusty, as they all were, and had a scarf wound about his arm. “Captain wants to move back to the camp.”
“What about the horses?” Azil asked.
“He says they’ll find us when they calm down.” He stooped. A little shyly, he said, “Hawk, can I help you?”
“I can do it,” she said. She rose stiffly, and very slowly, so as not to jar the strapped arm. “Are you hurt?”
“It’s nothing: A graze, when the tower fell.” Huw glanced about “Your bow—”
“Gone” she said. Bear moved to help her walk. She glared at him. “I am not crippled!”
“You helped me,” he said mildly.
Hawk’s lips tightened. She said, “I could use an arm.” He crooked his elbow, and let her hold him, matching her very much smaller stride with his.
A shadow of disappointment passed behind Huw’s eyes. He turned.
Azil caught the boy’s sleeve. “They’re old friends,” he said softly. “Sometimes it is easier to share one’s pain with those who have seen it before.”
Huw blinked, and then nodded. Azil opened his hand, and let him go.
Senmet of Mako, six feet away, caught his eye. She held, in both hands, a small black box. “I believe you know this box,” she said.
“I helped to make it.”
“Your lord asked me to take care of it.” She smiled at the expression on his face. “Do you fear it will corrupt me?”
“Should I?”
“No. Though it is kind of you to think so. They want us to move,” she said. “Will you walk with me? The footing grows treacherous further on, and I am an old woman.”
“I would be happy to walk with you,” Azil said gravely, “but only if you promise not to outrun me. You are no more an old woman than I am.”
They had just reached the edge of the pitted land when Gorthas, eyes gleaming crimson, surged out of a cavity, almost at their feet He was holding Shem beneath one arm. His free hand was clenched around a broad-bladed knife.
“My friend Azil. How fortuitous.” He smiled with dreadful malice at the singer. “I hoped you would pass by. I will rip his intestines out through his rib cage, as I did his father’s, and you will watch me do it. My master hates you, singer, do you know that?”
Azil said, “Your master sleeps.”
Gorthas’s eyes glowed with fury. “Yes. But he will wake. Did you not hear me say he is deathless? I will send your soul to serve him.”
Pebbles rattled on the icy ground. Finle, thirty feet away, reached for his bow.
Gorthas’s head snapped toward him. “Archer, if you touch your weapon, the child dies.” Finle went still. The warg-changeling grinned viciously.
“Finle Haraldsen, it was I who met your friend Garin on the wall that night. I ate his tongue and his eyes. You cannot know what pleasure it gave me.”
Rage and horror chased across Finle’s face. Gorthas set the tip of his knife against Shem’s belly. His fingers tightened on the knife. “Now, wolfling.”
“No,” said Senmet. “I will not allow this.” She spoke one sinuous, sibilant phrase. Azil’s hair stood on end. The knife in Gorthas’s hand became a wriggling black snake. He dropped it with a startled oath. A cry rang across the blistered earth: not a human sound, but a deep bestial bellow of fury. A gaunt white bear hurtled out of a hole toward the changeling and lunged for his throat.
Gorthas, with astonishing agility, spun away from the lunge and into the slag-heaps. The bear roared again, and followed, snapping at his heels. Finle leaped backwards. From everywhere, it seemed, men shouted, and ran toward them, weapons in hand.
“Don’t kill it!” Finle shouted. “The warg is here, and he has the boy. Let it flush him!”
Gorthas had vanished. The bear turned in a circle, head down, growling softly. Its ears were mutilated stumps on its pale head. Its eye sockets were scarred and empty.
“Stand still,” Senmet said softly to Azil. “It cannot see nor hear; it hunts by scent.”
The great head swung from side to side. Senmet spoke in the wizard’s tongue. The wind blew suddenly, strongly, out of the north. The bear raised its head, and howled. It leaped a ditch and flung itself up a pebbly bank, claws scrabbling for purchase.
Gorthas hurled Shem, wrapped in his cloak, into the bear’s path.
Finle loosed an arrow. It missed, and spun into a slag-heap. Grey smoke fouled the air: Gorthas the man vanished. A snouted, iron-colored warg crouched motionless among the slag-heaps. The archers released their arrows, but before any of the shafts hit, the warg disappeared from sight.
The white bear rumbled, deep in its throat. Its long head quested back and forth. It dropped to all fours, and started toward Shem.
“Hoy!” Finle shouted desperately. He waved his arms. “Here, look, look!” But the white bear ignored the noise.
A second, deeper rumble arose at the white bear’s back. A red-brown bear with amber eyes loped with deceptive speed across the pitted land. The white bear raised its muzzle, and turned stiff-legged to face this new challenge. The hair on its neck stood straight up. It opened its jaws and clashed its teeth together warningly. The huge cinnamon-colored bear imitated the gesture. They faced each other, heads lowered. White Bear charged. Red Bear braced for the attack. They roared, and locked jaws. White Bear, disengaging, slashed its teeth along Red Bear’s chest. Bellowing, Red Bear crashed into White Bear, knocking it off balance and exposing its flank. Lunging, he struck two slashing blows. Blood trickled down White Bear’s sides, staining the pale fur.
With six long strides, Finle reached Shem, scooped him from the path, and raced from danger. The oblivious combatants circled, roaring, and closed again. They slashed terrifyingly at each other, broke apart and plunged forward again, rising to their hind feet. Red Bear’s jaws closed massively in White Bear’s throat. White Bear yelped, and staggered.