Wardragon (10 page)

‘Couple hours maybe real time. But time don’t work here like it do back home.’

‘Is there no way back?’

‘To where you come from?’ She shook her head. ‘Everybody says the portals are only one way.’

‘Can’t a new portal be opened?’

‘Not from Hellhole. Magic don’t work the same way here. Some things it won’t do, like make portals. Tow says that’s just how it is, and why Hellhole was chosen. You’re from Q’zar, ain’t’cha?’

Jelindel nodded. Marla explained that Jelindel had talked while she had been unconscious.

‘So no one has ever escaped from Golgora?’

Marla shrugged. ‘Only if you believe in fairytales.’

With effort Jelindel sat up. ‘Tell me.’

‘It’s just a story. Even in this place hope don’t die easily.’

‘When?’

Exasperated, as with a child, Marla said that a man and some followers who appeared human but who had green blood had fashioned some kind of device that allowed them to leave Hellhole. But that had been over a thousand years ago.

‘Isn’t it odd how some stories span the centuries while most others fade as though they’ve never been?’ Jelindel said. She reached out and ran her fingertips over Marla’s scars.

Marla pulled back, glaring at Jelindel, but then she realised that the woman was muttering foreign words as she traced the welts of scarred tissue.

‘Your magic won’t work here, not the way you want it to,’ Marla said gruffly, but when Jelindel finally sat back the scars had already begun to disappear. Marla stared at them, then burst into tears.

‘How’d you do that?’ She kept touching them, as if she couldn’t believe it. ‘How’d you do that?’

Jelindel shrugged. ‘Maybe the bigger the magic is, the more it goes awry. That was a pretty simple spell.’

Marla eyed her, then the fast fading scars. ‘Maybe,’ she said.

The door burst open and Tow shouldered his way in. Behind him were two men dressed in uniforms standing near some kind of cold science vehicle.

‘Boss’s men,’ whispered Marla.

‘You’re goin’ on a trip,’ said Tow, not unpleasantly. Then to Marla: ‘Best you say goodbye to your new friend.’

Ten minutes later, bound hand and foot, with an odd-shaped medallion fixed around her throat like a collar, Jelindel was airborne and moving across the forest of Golgora in the newcomers’ flying craft, heading vaguely north.

The navigator, a young man with almond-shaped eyes, smiled at her, noting her interest in the panoramic view outside. ‘They don’t call it Hellhole for nothing. Life expectancy Outside is about an hour. If you make it through the first hour the old timers figure you’ll live a whole day. If you make it through the day then they give you a week, then a month. But newcomers rarely survive a week, ’less they join one of the settlements. And sometimes that don’t help much neither. My name is Torvid.’

‘You’re full of good cheer, Torvid. I’m –’

‘Jelindel. I know. We’ve been expecting you. Or the Preceptor has.’

‘So he really is here?’

Torvid nodded. ‘He’s waiting for you.’

Jelindel’s mind raced. If her old enemy the Preceptor was here, then he had been exiled too, yet his lieutenant, Kaleton, had not spoken of his superior as of one who had been lost, nor had he acted like one who was now in supreme command. Indeed, he had spoken as if everything was business as usual.

Curious, thought Jelindel.

They were aloft barely twenty minutes before they began a descent towards a heavily fortified structure built into the base of a mountain. A huge open cut mine had eaten into the interior of the slopes. A wide waste of land, some three hundred yards across, which had been burnt and deforested, surrounded the reinforced walls of the fortress. On the other side was dense forest.

A safety corridor, Jelindel thought. The Preceptor fears attack. But from whom?

Then came another thought: The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Moments later the airship thudded onto a landing bay just within the walls of the fortress. An armed squad hurried forward.

The Wardragon stood on a balcony of its fortress. Below was a sheer drop of a thousand feet into the great raw pit that exposed the mining operation on Golgora. Down in the pit, Hellholers and slaves from Q’zar worked day and night, tearing the precious ore from the earth, dying in droves. The Wardragon felt nothing for the creatures, and barely heeded them, yet an odd flicker of thought rose up from an ancient part of its labyrinthine mind: Why is life so precious to them?

It moved back inside, from sunlight into shadow, caught a glimpse of its reflection in a mirror, and stopped. Oddly startled. The Preceptor stared back. Rather, the Preceptor’s
face
stared back: craggy brows, deep-set eyes, narrow face lined with age, years of campaigns, and bitter disappointment.

The Preceptor wasn’t completely gone, but his time was short. Each day he sank a little further into oblivion, as if into an ocean of forgetfulness. The Wardragon almost envied him. Lately he had been plagued by – dreams? Except they could not be dreams, as the Wardragon did not sleep.

What were they then, these disquieting images?

There was a woman’s face, smiling, a hand reaching up in gentle caress. A laughing child. A man’s hand, drenched in blood. And pain. Awful pain.

Often the headaches followed these waking ‘dreams’.

None of the images came from the Preceptor. The Wardragon had plumbed the tyrant’s mind many times over, dredging it of all he needed (he now thought of himself as a ‘he’, and that was odd too).

The Wardragon came back to himself. He was still gazing into the mirror. They say the eyes are windows on the soul, he pondered. Do I have a soul? Can a soul be – made? He turned away from the mirror, and abruptly turned back, eyes flaring in alarm. He had thought of himself as ‘I’. What did that mean? he wondered. Am I an I now? It was this place. Golgora. The Hellholers said it changed you … Superstitious nonsense of course.

The Wardragon crossed to its desk and sat down. An array of monitors revealed, more graphically than any balcony vista ever could, the sheer range and magnitude of the operations here: the mine was just one aspect, where metals – and one very special substance – were extracted; there were also refineries, factories, workshops and labs where detailed electronic circuit boards were etched and the delicate components of engines constructed.

It was all part of the Plan. And the Plan was very old. Five thousand years old. The Wardragon was not quite that old. Not quite. But he was part of the Plan too. Indeed, the Plan had created him. He was its – embodiment, the Plan Incarnate …

The Wardragon owed much of his recent speedy success to two men: Kaleton, whose administration skills were formidable and Ras, who had provided many striking and unexpected solutions to stubborn problems – a feat Kaleton attributed to Ras’s brief possession by the Wardragon, though in truth much of Ras’s mind had remained dark to the Wardragon, impenetrably, disquietingly dark.

More to the point, Ras had not possessed the genetic ‘key’ that permitted permanent and total integration, and without which the host would soon die. On the other hand, the Preceptor had.

At this, the Wardragon felt a tug from within. The Preceptor was angry, and terrified. The Wardragon withdrew momentarily, allowed the Preceptor to come into his own body again, to move his limbs, to fill his lungs, to
feel
. He counted the seconds, sensed the Preceptor’s hungry joy, as if a nightmare had ended. Then, at the precise moment, the Wardragon struck like a hammer, pulverising the reborn soul. Smashing it back down, humiliating it, till it squealed in terror like some cornered animal. And all the time, part of the Wardragon’s mind, detached and clinical, watched, as one might study the bacteria in a Petri dish.

Ordinarily, the Wardragon felt the Preceptor’s presence as a kind of shadow within. A shadow which possessed a numinous quality. The Wardragon would never admit it, but he was a little in awe of it. He desperately wanted to know if this was the Preceptor’s
soul
.

An intercom sounded. The Wardragon activated it with a thought. Ras’s placid face appeared on the screen. ‘M’lord, we have her,’ he said simply.

The Wardragon immediately forgot about the Preceptor. He licked his lips, unaware that he did so. Unaware, or
oblivious
to the fact that he had now totally subjugated his host.

>WHAT IS HER CONDITION?<<<

‘She is unhurt, except for a mild concussion,’ said Ras. His voice, ever respectful and even, nevertheless contained a tone of mild rebuke. What puzzled the Wardragon was that he tolerated it, even found it strangely comforting. If he had been human, he might have imagined that someone long ago had spoken to him thus, someone he had cared about greatly. Still, there were limits. One day Ras would cross them.

‘Wardragon?’

The Wardragon shook off the reverie – wondering briefly if ‘he’ was beginning to malfunction – and realised with a shock that Ras was still watching him.

He spoke harshly. >>>IS SHE SHACKLED AND BOUND, AS I INSTRUCTED?<<<

‘She is, m’lord.’

>BRING HER TO ME<<< The intercom flicked off.

Jelindel was here. After all this time, he would see her again, see the only person who had ever bested him. (
Only by trickery
! insisted another part of his mind.) And he would kill her. Though not before she served a greater purpose.

To destroy magic you must use magic.

Jelindel would become part of a process by which magic was undone, removed once and for all from the universe, like the disease it was, as it should have been nearly five thousand years before, when the dragons had intervened.

Even now, the Wardragon felt the hot blood of anger at what the dragons had done, an anger his makers had built into his very matrix.

A door opened. Ras and three guards appeared, escorting Jelindel dek Mediesar. The Wardragon waved the guards out and they withdrew. Jelindel did not take her eyes off the Preceptor’s mailshirt. The Wardragon heard her soft intake of breath. Good, he thought. She recognises her true nemesis. The one who will unmake her.

>HAVE YOU BEEN HARMED?<<< it asked, still not turning.

‘Depends what you mean by harmed,’ said Jelindel, managing to keep most of the shock out of her voice. ‘Kidnapped in the night, shackled, exiled to this place, dragged here without a by-your-leave …’

>ARE YOU HUNGRY? THIRSTY?<<<

‘Both.’

>GOOD<<<

The Wardragon faced her. Jelindel stood in the middle of the room, her ankles and wrists fettered by chains of silver, an added counter against her magic. As a secondary precaution, there was also the medallion fixed about her throat. She briefly touched this with her fingers.

‘Are such cautions necessary against the great Wardragon?’ she asked.

>ARCHMAGES ARE MORE DANGEROUS WITH THEIR WORDS THAN ARE WARRIORS WITH THEIR WEAPONS<<<

‘You flatter me.’

>I DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE MY ENEMIES<<<

‘Yet you did so once before.’

>I WAS NOT FULLY INTEGRATED THEN. BELIEVE ME, IT WILL NOT HAPPEN AGAIN<<<

‘Maybe your programme isn’t working properly?’

The Wardragon regarded her. Was that just a guess? Or mage-sense?

‘May I sit?’ asked Jelindel.

The Wardragon waved her to a chair, and she hobbled over to it, seating herself.

‘You’ve gone to a lot of trouble to get me here,’ said Jelindel.

>YOU SHALL STAY ALIVE UNTIL I DEEM OTHERWISE<<<

‘What do you want with me?’ Jelindel tilted her head enquiringly.

The Wardragon had hesitated before answering – the first time it had ever hesitated. Kaleton had noted this, filed it away in his logical brain. The Wardragon had then explained that it could not brook an enemy who had once defeated him, even by trickery, lest this be an example to others; and in any case, removing one of the two greatest mages of Q’zar – Fa’red being the other – was good tactics.

Kaleton had agreed.

Yet the Wardragon had held back. The truth was that Jelindel still lived because she reminded it of someone. But that was not possible, because the Wardragon did not have such mortal failings as emotive memories. It was only a machine.

Jelindel erroneously saw a mix of rage and calm in the Preceptor’s eyes, and she was glad in one way. An emotional enemy was a careless enemy, and a careless enemy could be eluded.

The Wardragon smiled with the Preceptor’s face. How easily deluded these mortals were.

Chapter 8

History of the Green-bloods

J
elindel had a lot of time to think. Astonishingly, the mailshirt had resurfaced, despite being buried by her beneath an entire hillside. More puzzling still was that it had ended up in the hands of the Preceptor. Though perhaps that wasn’t strange. After all, he had once sought it with all his might and cunning, desiring it above all else.

Well, his wish had been granted.

But if Jelindel was any judge, he was not very happy about it. Indeed, if her mage-sense spoke true, then she had to revise her earlier observation. He was not very
anything
any more. Obviously, the mailshirt had possessed him as it had once possessed Jelindel’s friend, the High Priestess, Kelricka. On that occasion, Jelindel had managed to fool the Wardragon and deactivate it. Then it hit her. Did the mailshirt want
revenge
? How could it? Revenge was a human emotion. And if there was one thing the Wardragon was not, it was human.

So why was she here? Why her? Why drag her to this damnable place? The Preceptor had reason to hate her; perhaps that was it. The Preceptor’s
feelings
had leaked into the mailshirt and somehow coloured its decisions. If so, it might indicate a weakness, something that could be exploited and used against the Wardragon. But not while she was locked in this cell.

She had scoured every inch of the room many times. Apart from the guard who pushed her meals through a flap in the cell door, she had no other visitors. Nor could she see other inmates. The term ‘cell’ was somewhat redundant on this world, of course. Everyone on Golgora was a prisoner.

The cell did have one peculiarity, however. In two corners of the ceiling were miniature farsights. These swivelled as though attracted to her movement. They did not seem to be driven by magic, but powered by cold science. Jelindel surmised that via these devices the Wardragon observed her.

She lay on her bunk and stared back at the farsights. There was something soulless and inhuman about cold science. What enjoyment could someone gain by looking at her via a mechanical engine when they could just as easily view her in person? This perplexed Jelindel, and the countess was not one to be easily perplexed. It was interesting that cold science worked on Golgora, apparently unchanged – unlike magic. The flying craft, too, had flown here without a hitch.

Why was magic different? She sat up startled, knowing the answer. It wasn’t magic that was affected by this world; it was the man or woman who used it. Change the mage and you change the magic.

That meant that Jelindel dek Mediesar was already changing.

On a sudden impulse, she got off the bed and leaned it against one corner of the wall. She stripped the straw mattress, and scaled the wire base. Reaching up she clasped the farsight and wrenched it from its mooring. Satisfied it no longer worked – its blinking red eye shut down – she jumped down and similarly disabled the farsight in the opposite corner.

It wasn’t long before her actions brought the guards running. Jelindel threw herself to the floor, so that it looked as if she had fallen off the frame and knocked herself out.

‘Bloody idiot,’ said the first guard, after he stopped to take in the scene. He was a middle-aged man with grey hair and a filthy beard whose name was Bogon. He ordered the others to set the room right. Jelindel was dumped back on her mattress while he sent for an ‘electrifier’ to heal the farsights.

While they waited, Bogon picked up one of the farsights, handling it as he would a dead rat. ‘Beats me how these things work,’ he muttered.

‘Electricity,’ suggested one of the younger men.

‘Well, now don’t that explain everything,’ Bogon sneered. He moved closer to the bed, peering at the device in the light from the window.

Just a little closer, thought Jelindel, whose mage-sense had placed him in the room. She did not dare open her eyes. She needed the element of surprise. Then Bogon took that fateful step closer.

Jelindel’s hand snapped out, drawing the man’s sword before he was even aware anything was happening. Then Jelindel had the sword at Bogon’s throat and the others froze in the act of drawing their own weapons.

‘Stay! Stay your hands,’ Bogon cried to the other guards.

Jelindel said, ‘Everyone, move to that wall, get down on your knees. Now!’

‘Do it,’ said Bogon. ‘Do as she says.’

The others grumbled, but complied. Jelindel relieved Bogon of the keys to the cell, shoved him at his fellows, slipped out of the cell and had the door shut and locked before the man had regained his footing.

Bogon rushed to the grille in the door and clutched the bars.

‘You’ll not get far,’ he said, scowling. ‘This is a mighty big place.’

‘Then why don’t you tell me the way out?’

‘Only way back is the way you came, and there’s a full garrison of guards ’tween you and the outside,’ said Bogon, nodding to the left and putting a sneer in his voice. But his eyes flicked to the right. Twice. Three times. The other guards, crowding up behind, could not see this. Was Bogon trying to tell her something? Did she have a friend in this place? Well, luck and fate must guide her.

She went right.

The Wardragon watched Jelindel’s escape on its monitors. Its finger was poised above the intercom button but it did not summon more guards; it did not reveal her whereabouts to the legion of men and women who now searched the Fortress.

And it could not say exactly why.

It watched her hide, weave spells of concealment that – even when they went awry – worked well enough for her purposes; it watched as she made it to the outer wall, searched for some breach or manner of egress, only to realise there was almost no way to leave this place. Unless …

Jelindel walked brazenly into the guardhouse at the main barbican. Several guards sprang to their feet. None saw the faint flickering of blue light which sprang from her lips to the captain of the guards, a narrow-faced woman in her forties.

‘The Wardragon’s ordered she be dumped outside,’ said the woman. ‘For sport.’

Her aide snorted. ‘She’ll not last more’n an hour out there, and that’s little enough sport.’ He eyed the other guards. ‘Course, if she weren’t chained …’

Several of the guards laughed and started offering bets. The aide acted as bookie, writing them down. He looked at the guard captain, who shrugged.

‘Can’t see it’d do much harm,’ she said, shooting a quick look at the gatehouse cameras. ‘You got them eyes switched off, Hass?’

‘There’s not a trick you know that I don’t,’ replied a bear of a man. ‘Let’s do it.’

A short time later, Jelindel was dragged to the top of the barbican. Here there was a winch and pulley system, and a wooden platform that looked fragile and ungainly. She was made to crawl onto the platform which dangled from the winch arm. The whole thing was swung out over the walls, and lowered. Jelindel gripped the edges of the platform as it swayed and spun, threatening to throw her off. Then it grounded.

Jelindel stumbled off the platform. She was outside.

‘Well, get goin’, you dumb fool!’ shouted Hass. ‘Them ravers hang about the fence looking for a cheap feed.’

Others yelled similar inducements to get her moving: a lot of wagers were riding on her. Jelindel would have loved to have lost all their money, but not enough to stay here and get slaughtered. She broke into a run, sprinting for the jungle on the other side of the cleared safety zone.

High up on the side of the Fortress, a lone figure stood on a balcony, watching Jelindel disappear into the tree line. For a long time afterwards, the figure did not move. It was still there when night fell.

Jelindel plunged into the cool darkness of the jungle, and felt instant relief. At least here she could not be seen; nor was everything bathed in that awful, blood-red light. There was no escape, however, from Golgora itself and its oppressive, stifling presence. The moment she had gotten outside the Fortress wall, she’d felt a kind of depression settle over her, as if the air itself leached away hope.

Somewhere above the thick canopy, lightning cracked across the sky, and for an instant everything lit up, as if the light came from the ground, and not from above. Jelindel shivered.

She kept moving for at least an hour, till she was well away from the Wardragon’s base. Only then did she rest, leaning on her knees to catch her breath.

She went over her options as she kept a vigilant eye for any pursuit. By now she knew her deception in the guardhouse would have surfaced. Of necessity, she needed to stay within range of the Wardragon’s fortress. There was nothing to be gained by fleeing deep into the jungle. And there were settlements, like Tow’s. With luck, she might join one of them. Unless the Wardragon put a bounty on her head; Jelindel strongly suspected that loyalty was in short supply in this place.

Above all, she needed a friend. And the only person she could think of was Marla.

So be it. Taking a deep breath, she turned and angled back towards the Wardragon’s fortress, bending her path southwards. During the flight from Tow’s castle, she had mentally mapped the route, never taking her eyes off the terrain below. Then she spotted a wide river. It led – after a somewhat meandering journey – to the cliff wall along which the centaurs had trailed her.

By the time she reached a point some two miles south of the fortress, the cloud mass had thickened and a false twilight had fallen; sustained heat lightning flickered within the clouds, giving them a lurid, bruised look. She stopped where the jungle thinned and surveyed the terrain ahead: here the land entered a swampy region that bordered, she guessed, the headwaters of the river. To the east, volcanoes belched smoke and lava, and lit the underbelly of the clouds. The smell of sulphur was stifling.

Jelindel set off south, using the glow from the volcanoes to navigate. She walked thus for two hours, till her legs felt like lead and her head spun with weariness.

She only realised how inattentive she had become, when she was ankle deep in a muddy pool. Almost at once she began to sink. Quicksand, she thought wildly. She lurched backwards quickly, but her feet were snared. She stumbled, arms windmilling, and fell. The moment she hit the water she felt something close on her left foot, holding her tightly. The pool began to bubble and froth: something was rising from the depths.

Panicking, Jelindel scrabbled in the murky water for some purchase, a log, a tree root, anything. But her grasping hands found nothing. Then a dark shadow heaved itself from the quagmire and towered over her. She saw two red eyes, glowing like coals. She hurled a spell of binding at the creature, and this checked it for a moment. Its grip on her ankle loosened.

Jelindel twisted free and tried to dog paddle to safety. Then the hand was back, gripping her whole leg. In an eye-blink, it had dragged her beneath the surface.

Jelindel lashed out with her fists and her free leg, kicking and punching. It was next to impossible to use magic while submerged, and she quickly felt herself weakening. Her lungs wanted to burst. Darkness closed in on her, and her last thought was of Daretor, and how hurt he would be.

For a moment, Jelindel thought that she had woken in Black Quell’s domain. Something was thumping her chest, and a hard leathery tube was in her mouth, tasting of old sweat. It pinned her tongue painfully against her lower teeth as air snorted into her lungs. Nearby she heard the sound of a bellows. She coughed and spluttered and all the pounding and blowing stopped and the leathery tube was snatched from her mouth.

She sat up coughing, and spewing pond water. Someone clapped, and others joined in.

‘Here,’ said a familiar voice. A damp rag cleared away caked-on mud from Jelindel’s eyes. When she could see clearly, she realised that Taggar was standing before her, a worried smile on his face. He was surrounded by a group of people. Tow was one of them, Marla another.

Jelindel leapt to her feet, swung back her arm, and punched Taggar. He sprawled to the ground, blinking in surprise.

‘Traitor!’ she shouted, shaking the numbness from her knuckles.

Tow helped Taggar to his feet.

Taggar worked his jaw. ‘One forgets the mage-born sometimes use forces other than magic,’ he said ruefully. ‘It’s not often I’m taken by surprise.’