"
Won
the crown," Abas corrected. "You're not very good at telling stories."
I ignored his criticism and turned to Xenos. "Did you make that crown?"
Xenos spoke for the first time, his voice as sweet and melodious as the sound you get when you accidentally telephone a fix number. "Yes," he said.
"The barbarians want that crown back," I said. "And I'm told Cynric gave it to a dragon who was ravaging the south."
Rather than replying, Xenos popped another centipede into his mouth.
"We sent messengers to the barbarian camp to let them know we were willing to return the crown if we could get it, but the barbarians killed the messengers."
Andreanna turned to Abas and whispered loudly, "Big surprise."
"I wasn't surprised," Abas said. "If I was a barbarian, I would have killed the messengers, too."
"I think," I said, "that we are in imminent danger of the entire barbarian camp attacking." I looked at my advisers. "Any thoughts?"
Sister Mary Ursula said, "To forgive and to be forgiven are two sides of the coin of Harmony."
When it became clear she had no more to say, I said, "Yes, well, anybody else?"
Deming said, "Though yesterday's raiding party was small, they
did
bring an entire armed camp into our lands. Presumably that was in case the smaller group did not succeed. If they were willing to wage war to get the crown, I can't believe they'll forgive the killing of their king—regardless of how many sides of coins forgiveness covers."
I said, "So you're saying to forget retrieving the crown, to concentrate on defending the castle."
Deming nodded.
"Still..." I said. I had to believe that if Rasmussem included a dragon, I was supposed to have
something
to do with it. "How difficult would it be to track down this dragon?"
Uldemar said, "I could find him in my scrying glass."
The blind guy,
I thought.
"Sure," I told him.
Uldemar was wearing a pendant that he took off from around his neck and laid on the table. It looked like a slice of onyx—flat and about the circumference of a cross section of a baseball—in a gilt frame.
I bent closer. It
might
have been glass, but it was totally black. I could see myself and part of the room reflected in it.
Uldemar arranged his hands so that all ten of his fingers rested on the edge of his scrying glass, which left only a small area open in the middle.
As I watched that space, a swirl formed beneath the surface, as though thick black liquid were being stirred. But the swirling got lighter, as though the invisible stirrer were adding a lighter substance, like someone adding cream to melted licorice. Then more and more cream. I glanced up at Uldemar and almost squealed. The exact opposite was happening to his eyes: His white eyes were aswirl with darkness.
A bony finger jabbed me in the side, and I came close to becoming airborne. But it wasn't one of the ghosts; it was just Xenos, who was so pleased with himself for startling me that he practically choked up a piece of centipede.
Still, Andreanna found fault with me rather than Xenos. "If Cynric hadn't been so fevered and delirious when he was dying," she announced to all, "he never would have chosen her."
Finally, Uldemar's eyes and the scrying glass were reversed: The glass was smooth as white porcelain, and Uldemar's eyes were totally black, without any definition or detail at all. Unsettling as it was, I couldn't look away. After several long moments, Uldemar closed his eyes, probably for about five seconds. When he opened them, they were once more featureless white. The scrying glass had resumed its former blackness.
He said, "The dragon is in the southern province, in a cave on a mountaintop known as the Old Hag."
Andreanna said, "How is this little sheep-tending person going to overcome a dragon?"
I glanced at my good old ally Abas, who could—single-handed—overcome wild boars, undead ogres, and princess-kidnapping barbarians.
"I don't do dragons," he said.
Of course not. Since it was
my
game, naturally
I
would be the one to have to do it.
Orielle said, "If you can get close enough to the creature, I could give you a potion that would poison it."
"Wonderful." Xenos chortled so hard I expected to see centipedes come flying out of his nose. "She could present the dragon with a doctored ham-and-cheese sandwich: 'Here, Dragon, why don't you eat this before you eat me?' Fast-acting is this potion? Or did you have in mind something that would be absorbed through its skin? 'Care for a massage before I die, Dragon?'"
Orielle smiled as though she found his comments amusing even though they were derisive. Then she gestured with her finger, and Xenos's ear fell off.
It sat, hairy and warty, on the table.
"Put it back," he screamed at her. "Put it back now."
"What?" She tapped her own delicately shaped ear. "Can't hear you."
"Stop fighting," I told both of them. "We need to stick together or we're likely to all die together."
Orielle sulked but made a dismissive gesture to the hairy ear. Xenos snatched it up and slapped it against the side of his head. It stuck immediately, and I figured it was best not to mention that he'd put it on upside down.
"Uldemar," I said, "do you have any ideas on how to overcome the dragon and regain the crown?"
"No," he said. "I'm mostly a finder."
"Yeah," Xenos complained. "And mostly he's good at finding dead bodies. That's probably how he found the dragon—by the leftover bits and pieces of those who went before you to kill it."
"That's true," Uldemar admitted.
I rubbed my hand over my face. I was having trouble concentrating when I was so tired and no one was cooperating. "There has to be some way," I said. "But I haven't slept or eaten in ages, and I can't think straight. I'm going to take a nap and..."
What was all that racket coming from down the hall?
Probably the ghosts,
I thought,
already practicing sleep prevention.
But it wasn't.
A guard came scrambling over the debris of the broken door. "Attack!" he yelled. "We're under attack!"
SUBJ: URGENT—Bios
DATE: 5/25 04:12:57 P.N. US eastern daylight time
FROM: Nigel Rasmussem
<
nrasmussemarasmussem.com
>
TO: dept. heads distribution list
These readouts are alarming. G. B. doesn't have much time left. Premature disconnection may be the only option, and the technologists warn this could result in severe brain damage likely to leave G. B. In an Irreversible vegetative state.
CHAPTER TWENTY***The translation software garbled Japan's last message. Japan, please have something for us. Reword and resend ASAP.
Kenric, Abas, and Xenos were fastest. I was right behind them as we ran down the hallway. From outside I could hear yelling, but when I reached the doorway to the courtyard, I could see the drawbridge was up, which was a pleasant surprise. A flaming arrow hit the doorframe inches from Xenos's head. He yelped and went into reverse, treading my toes.
"Never mind," he muttered, slinking past me, past Andreanna and Deming, who were on my heels, back into the safety of the hallway. Orielle had stopped far enough back to be out of danger of stray arrows, and Sister Mary Ursula had just rounded the corner, huffing as she waddled in our direction. We'd forgotten poor Uldemar back at the table.
Just as I was about to peek out of the doorway, Kenric and Abas came racing back from outside. I stepped out of their way barely in time to avoid a collision. Abas paused only long enough to grab the burning arrow out of the wooden doorframe and fling it to the ground, where it would burn out harmlessly. Kenric threw open a side door, and both brothers dashed up a steep spiral staircase.
I took a moment to see what was going on in the courtyard. Some of our guards were there, lugging buckets of water to put out fires that had caught in the thatched roofs of the surrounding outbuildings—like the barracks and the well housing. But most of the guards were up on the walls. Assuming that was where the stairs led, I followed after Abas and Kenric.
The noise of men shouting became louder.
I came out onto the wall that surrounded both castle and courtyard. I know I'd been over it when the barbarians had carried me, but at that time, I hadn't been in any condition to notice much. Now I saw that the walls were wide enough to accommodate men running back and forth, trying to defend the castle. There was no safety rail on the castle side—which made my twenty-first-century self cringe at the possibility of injuries and subsequent lawsuits—but the side that faced out had that typical solid-then-open pattern, like a jack-o'-lantern smile with every other tooth missing, that my medieval self recognized as battlements. The guards could hide behind the upright sections, the
merlons,
then shoot arrows through the openings, or
crenellations.
The trouble was that
enemy
arrows also could fly through the openings. Dead and wounded men lay where they dropped, stepped over by guards intent on keeping the barbarians from scaling the walls.
When I'd been in the barbarian camp, I'd had the impression that there were a lot of them. They looked like even more now that they were running toward the castle waving their swords, firing their arrows, and battering at the upright drawbridge with a tree trunk long enough to reach over the ditch. They had catapults, too. I was just in time to see the first bombardment, huge rocks wrapped with rags that had been soaked in something flammable. Two of the rocks landed in the courtyard, where they didn't inflict much damage; but the third landed on the battlement itself) crushing one man and burning those who tried to go to his rescue.
Abas and Kenric had taken up bows and were firing into the advancing crowd of barbarians. I hovered uselessly, worrying that the ghosts that had followed me from the catacombs might find it amusing to give me a little shove while I was standing in this precarious place. The smells of blood and pitch were making me woozy, and the smoke stung my eyes.
"Princess Janine!" one of the guards called above the screams of men, some attacking, some dying. "Lady, this is a dangerous place for one not trained in war craft. Best for you to find a more secure position within."
He was right. Even if my personality had provided me with the inclination to participate, Rasmussem had not provided me with the skill for fighting. But I couldn't believe my role in this battle was merely to seek a suitable hiding place—even though that
was
my inclination.
I had to fight every instinct I had. "What can I do to help?" I shouted back.
For one who had been so concerned about getting me to safety, he was quick enough to point to one of the pages who was dumping a basketful of arrows to replenish the stock the archers were using. "Show the princess where the supplies are kept," the guard ordered the page.
And so I started running up and down the stairs, bringing load after load of arrows to the archers, delivering them to different stations on the wall to make sure nobody ran out. Apparently the ghosts were diverted enough by all the activity that they didn't feel called on to trip me or knock me down.
Despite my ongoing terror, things went well until I dropped a basket of arrows between Abas and Kenric. The area was slick from water used to douse some burning debris, and as I turned, one of my feet slipped. No amount of frantic arm-waving was enough to regain my balance. I could tell I was sliding toward the edge, like an out-of-control skater. I had time to ask myself)
Can I possibly survive a fall from this height?
and to answer myself,
Not likely,
before my right foot cleared the edge, then my left—and then someone had hold of me around my waist and hauled me back up onto the wall.
That someone was Kenric. I saw the surprise on his face as he took in my damp, sooty appearance and recognized me, and then he gave that grin that—even under the best of circumstances—made my knees weak. "Thank you," I managed to whisper.
"You're welcome."
Too bad he was my half brother. Too bad he wasn't real.
Behind him a barbarian who had shimmied up a rope anchored by a grappling hook cleared the top of the wall, and Abas took his head off with a swipe of his sword, then he sliced through the rope to prevent anyone else from climbing up.
I looked down the dizzying height and saw a cluster of barbarians holding their shields above the heads of other men to protect them from the arrows our archers were raining down on them. "What are they doing?" I asked.
"Sapping," Kenric told me.
My Rasmussem-provided subconscious told me that meant they were digging a tunnel so that section of wall would collapse.
"Are we in danger?" I asked.
"Not imminent danger. It will be worse at night, when we can't see them so well. Meanwhile..." He nodded beyond me, and I saw that Captain Penrod and some of his men had emerged from a nearby doorway, carrying a huge cauldron that I could only assume held something hot and nasty.
The barbarians must have had a lookout for just such a thing, for as our men tipped the cauldron, a trumpet or horn sounded, and the barbarian sappers ran from their place by the wall so that the burning oil spilled only on the slowest of them.
Then suddenly their horn sounded again, and all the barbarians fell back.
"What's that all about?" Kenric asked suspiciously.
"Dunno," Abas answered. "No reason for a retreat."
Back and back the barbarians pulled, until they were out of range of our archers. Then one man, bearing a white flag, approached on horseback.
"Surely they're not surrendering?" I said, though I very much hoped they were.
"Parley," Captain Penrod told me. "They want to talk—though I don't know why. They weren't winning, but neither were they losing."
Watching with barely suppressed strain as the barbarian messenger approached, the castle guards waited, their arrows notched and trained on him.