The Dragon Book (43 page)

Sunila found a leech fat with his blood clinging to his leg when he came up onto dry land again. “All kinds of bloodsuckers in this miserable place,” he snarled, using a smoldering twig to make it let go, then bandaging the oozing hole it had left in his flesh.

“Not the same. You can find leeches in the Empire,” Kyosti said.

“You can find other vampires there, too. Have you ever seen a tax collector out by daylight?” Sunila retorted. Kyosti laughed. By the linguistic sorcerer’s expression, he hadn’t been joking.

Down sank the sun. The explorers encamped with it still above the horizon; twilight didn’t last long in the tropics. After supper, Kyosti used the garlic powder he’d refused the night before. He hoped—he prayed—it would help. There was garlic in the evening sausages, too; they eased his mind as they filled his belly.

All of which helped much less than he wished that it would have when he woke in bright moonlight and found himself face-to-face with the
tsaldaris.
Despite that moonlight, far more brilliant than it would have been anywhere in the Empire of Mussalmi, the undead creature’s eyes were two black sinkholes that gave back nothing … or did red flicker somewhere far down in their depths, like hellfire seen from heaven?

“You are mine,” the vampire whispered. Sunali’s cantrip wouldn’t be operating now, but Kyosti understood even though the thing wasn’t speaking Mussalmian.

“I am yours,” the wizard agreed, breathing garlic fumes into the creature’s face. Its features twisted, almost as Relander’s had when the sun touched them. The garlic hurt it, then—but not enough to stop it. Its eyes might have been embered darkness, but its fangs gleamed in the tropical moonlight. Kyosti knew just where they would pierce him. He could hardly wait.

Fight! Run! Cast a spell!
screamed a small, still-unseduced part of his mind. The rest, though, the rest was content to let whatever happened happen. He remembered how pleased with himself Relander had looked when they found him.

The
tsaldaris
carried a reek of the grave. Where did it hide between sunup and sundown? Why hadn’t the natives caught it and given it a final death long before this? A singularly pointless thing to wonder as those fangs sank closer.

And then, quite suddenly, the fangs disappeared. So did the terrible eyes. And so did the rest of the austerely beautiful face. As soon as Kyosti couldn’t see it anymore, it no longer seemed austerely beautiful. It was the most horrible thing he’d ever set eyes on. The spell it had laid on him—on him! a wizard!—was gone.

“Help us, curse it!” Sunila said hoarsely. Kyosti realized that the vampire’s spell might not be altogether gone. The creature’s eyes hadn’t disappeared because it withdrew. They’d disappeared because Sunila and one of the little blond natives had thrown a big black sack over its head. Now they had to fight like a couple of demons to keep the monster from breaking away and fleeing—or, worse, from breaking away, using its strange powers, and avenging itself.

When Kyosti’s wits truly did come back to what they should have been, he used a spell of his own. He was with the expedition not least because he was one of the Empire’s leading preservationists. Specimens he enchanted would stay as fresh as if they were alive for years, for decades, perhaps for centuries. With him along, the explorers didn’t need to carry dozens of heavy, awkward jugs of formalin (which was devilishly expensive) or strong spirits (which weren’t, but which
were
all too apt to be used for purposes unrelated to preservation).

He’d never cast a spell that met such resistance. But then, he’d never before tried to freeze any creature, alive or undead, with a conscious will of its own. Storytellers spun tales about preservationists and the girls rash enough to scorn them. Kyosti had always thought those stories were so much nonsense. Now he was convinced of it. Even slowing the vampire down took all the magecraft he had in him.

Slowing it down sufficed. That let Sunila and the native—and Kyosti himself, once he scrambled out of his bedroll—keep the black sack over its head, and eventually let them bind it so it could not possibly escape.

Despite the spell, despite the bonds, it kept struggling to free itself. That was horrible to behold: it was like watching a man move deep underwater, or in the swaddling folds of nightmare. Kyosti watched anyhow. This … thing had come much too close to killing him, and he wanted to see it die the death. Some of the savants in the expedition had more dispassionate reasons to observe the vampire—or so they claimed, anyhow.

Little by little, the eastern sky turned pale, and then bright. Stars faded. The moon went from gold to chalk. Under its shroud, the
tsaldaris
keened. It might not be able to see out, but it knew what was coming. It knew, and it feared.

At last, after what seemed simultaneously a very long time and no time at all, the sun slid up over the eastern horizon. Sunbeams walked down the trees from top to bottom, then glided over the ground toward the vampire. It keened again and moved a little faster, but not nearly fast enough.

A sunbeam touched a bound hand. The hand didn’t merely shrivel, as poor Relander’s face had done. It burst into flame. In an instant, the whole vampire was on fire. It burned hot and fierce, like fatwood. The glare was so fierce, Kyosti had to turn his face. The smell … He wanted to drool and to heave, both at the same time.

It was soon over. The fire left little ash, most of it from the sack and the bonds. The morning breeze sprang up and blew away what there was. The
tsaldaris
might never have been there at all. But, in that case, why was Relander dead?

“Well,” Baron Toivo said roughly, “let’s head south.”

AS the land rose toward the peaks of the tropical continent’s spine, jungle gave way to more open woodland, then the woodland to savannas. Days stayed hot, though the hateful mugginess subsided. Nights no longer sweltered. They grew mild, then, sometimes, forthrightly chilly. Flies persisted, but the mosquitoes didn’t. Kyosti missed them not a copper’s worth.

Few Mussalmian explorers had come so far south. Sunila’s translation cantrip got a workout. As before, it proved better than nothing, but not always good enough.

One native tribe, seeing tall, swarthy strangers crossing their lands, wasted no time trying to talk to them but attacked instead. The natives promptly regretted it. Their spears and arrows and half-baked sorceries were no match for the magic and weapons the Mussalmians brought to bear. The handful of blonds from the raiding party who escaped fled, shrieking in terror. Naked-headed vultures spiraled down out of the sky to commence disposing of the natives who’d fallen.

Vultures, yes. But Kyosti eyed the blue-enameled bowl overhead in hope of spying larger visitors. Some stories said dragons were four or five or ten times larger than the largest vultures. Others claimed they were four or five or ten times larger than that. Others still … Well, Kyosti didn’t waste his time even trying to believe those. Some talespinners had more imagination than they knew what to do with.

The natives had managed to wound a couple of Mussalmians. Even that tiny success irked Baron Toivo. The baron didn’t mind losing a savant to a venomous serpent, or another to a striped beast that was to a house cat as imagined dragons were to vultures. By Toivo’s attitude, wild animals were some of the hazards explorers faced, but Mussalmians should outdo these southern savages under any and all circumstances.

Imaginary dragons … Kyosti saw them in his dreams, and in his mind’s eye. With the eyes of his body, he saw vultures and hawks and crows and long-necked birds that ran on two legs like men and were even taller than Mussalmians. With sarcastic aplomb, one of the explorers dubbed them sparrows. Kyosti never found out who’d used the name first, but inside a day it was in everybody’s mouths.

Those enormous “sparrows” made good eating. Their meat was red as beef and tasted much like it. A couple of their eggs could feed the whole expedition—if the cooks were patient enough to let them get done.

Eyeing a broken shell with respect, Kyosti said, “Easy enough to think of a dragon hatching from something that size.”

“Just because something is easy to conceive doesn’t make it true,” Sunila answered tartly. “I think we are chasing shadows here myself. If we find anything at all, we’ll find something like a large snake—or maybe a lizard—you wait and see. Exaggeration from people who never really saw the creature will have done the rest.”

“Some people say men invented the gods that way.” Kyosti pointed toward one of the smoking mountains ahead. “What
could
that be but a god’s breath, after all?”

“Yes, what?” the linguistic sorcerer agreed dryly. “As a matter of fact, I hold to that view myself—though not where the stuffier sort of priest can hear me do it, I admit. Exactly the same phenomenon here with dragons, I tell you.”

Kyosti nodded. “I wouldn’t be surprised. We’re learning all sorts of other things, though. That nasty vampire, and the ‘sparrows,’ and who knows what else we’ll come upon when we climb higher? We wouldn’t have seen any of it if we’d stayed at home in the Empire.”

“You wouldn’t have almost got killed if you’d stayed at home in the Empire,” Sunila reminded him.

That was true, but Kyosti didn’t care to think about it. “What’s the line from the old poet?” he said. “‘Man seeks the gods, and seeking finds them’—something like that, anyhow. What we learn on the voyage is what matters.”

“I suppose so.” Sunila spoke with the air of someone granting a sizable concession. But then the other man brightened. “I’ve improved the translation cantrip a lot since we got here. It’s bumped up against
really
foreign languages, the way it can’t in the Empire anymore. Almost everyone there speaks Mussalmian along with his birthspeech—instead of it, these days, more often than not.”

“I doubt my great-grandparents knew it very well,” Kyosti said. “But I can’t speak a word of their clan’s jibber-jabber. Don’t want to, either. Things are simpler when there’s only one language, and we all use it.”

“You’re a sensible fellow,” Sunila said, by which he meant that Kyosti’s opinion here was the same as his own.

“I wonder what we
will
come across next,” Kyosti said in musing tones.

“If the moon were full, I’d guess werewolves,” Sunila replied.

“Some of the bone-crunching scavengers that howl in the grass sound as if they ought to be werewolves, or else madmen raving,” Kyosti said. “I don’t think anyone described them before, or the big striped cats.”

“For Antti’s sake, I hope there are gods in the heavens.” Sunila wasn’t going off on a tangent; Antti was the savant the great cat had slain. With a sigh, the linguist sorcerer went on, “But I know the difference between what I hope and what I believe. I hope we find dragons, too.” He spread his hands. Sorcerers back in the Empire lived soft, but his palms, like Kyosti’s, were ridged with callus. “No matter what I hope, though, I know what I believe there, too.”

UP in the foothills, soil covered green-gray stone only sparsely. Grass and shrubs grew where they could. Little beasts something like rabbits and something like tiny deer scurried through the undergrowth, what there was of it. On high ground they kept lookouts who chirruped whenever they saw danger.

They didn’t always see it. Snakes ate the little beasts. So did hawks. A dragon swooping down on them … Kyosti shook his head. One of those furry scurriers would have been no more than a gooseberry to a hungry dragon, even if dragons were on the small side of what the tales claimed for them.

Suddenly, all the lookouts chirruped at once and tumbled down off their perches. Seeing nothing out of the ordinary, Kyosti wondered why—but only for an instant. He let out his own shout of alarm as the ground shuddered under his feet. He might have been embarrassed if half the other explorers hadn’t also cried out at the same time.

How long did the earthquake last? Probably not very long, as those things went—it was just a small one. But it seemed to go on forever. A few rocks fell over. Off to the west, a bigger rumble spoke of a landslide. Birds sprang screeching into the air. Dust rose with them, in a thick, choking cloud.