A Sword for a Dragon

It was when the bishop found a dead child talking to him, just before a funeral service in the House of Auros in the city of Dzu that he knew he could not escape.

At night the eyes bore into him, like lancing points of fire from the dark. His allegiance was demanded. His beliefs made a mockery of. A voice whispered in his dreams.

And it was true, and he knew it. His faith was gone. There was no Auros, no benevolent center of the world. Even the House of Auros in tumbledown Dzu was a fraud. It was, in fact, the ancient Temple of the serpent god, Sephis. It had been turned over to the priests of Auros a few centuries before, when Sephis lost his hold upon Ourdh and the tyrant rule of Dzu was thrown down.

But the bishop of Auros in Dzu had dabbled in the Dark Arts. He had delved in the black books of the Masters. He had begun experiments. To escape censure from a disastrous situation involving a monkey, a highborn young woman, and an attempt to exchange their consciousnesses, he had taken a terrible oath to the mystery man who had saved him from disaster.

Now they had come to him for their payment.

The dead child refused to be buried. It lingered in the bishop’s chambers.

“They are waiting for you,” it announced. It led him to the front door of the Temple.

The skull-faced man who called himself the high priest, Odirak, was waiting, accompanied by a man hidden in a voluminous black cloak. Behind this figure came a girl of perhaps seventeen years, wearing nothing but a cotton shift. She was slack-mouthed, benumbed by an enchantment.

The bishop let them into the House of Auros and then opened the heavy gate that shut away the basement. They went down into the great chamber of the pit, and the man in the cloak pulled back his hood. The bishop quailed. The man’s face ended at the nose, all below was a glistening expanse of horn. The pale, naked scalp rose above eyes that were like windows onto a place of fire.

The dead child giggled, and the bishop’s skin crawled.

The bishop knew that this was a Mesomaster, most powerful of all the acolytes of the Masters themselves. Never had the bishop dreamed that he might come to this pass.

With harsh phrases of power, the thing summoned a Black Mirror out of nothingness. It hung there in the air, a gleaming circle in which the grey shining backwash of chaos surged. At the Mesomaster’s command, the mirror floated downward and arranged itself at knee height. The girl lay down, her eyes, mercifully, were quite blank. The dead child held a razor in its hand.

The bishop thought back to his disastrous experiment. What a fool he had been! Once again he wondered if he had been guided to the black arts, whether the enemy had known of some weakness in him that could be worked on to finally trap him.

The dead child slit the girl’s throat, and tilted her head to spread her blood across the non-surface of the Black Mirror. It smoked and stank, and while it smoked the Mesomaster recited a terrible chant.

Something coalesced in the darkness within the Black Mirror. Surrounded in a halo of fractionalized sparks, the thing grew larger. Twisting motions writhed in the clouds of chaos.

The Mesomaster stepped back. From the mirror there came a gush of a thick green vapor that spilled out and rolled across the floor of the pit like a liquid, slowly filling it to knee height.

Light blazed suddenly from a point within the vapor. Something began to rise out of the vapor and take solid form. It was a dark green at first, but slowly it became golden and the surface took on a pattern of scales.

At length a great golden serpent coiled upon the floor and looked down upon them with huge expressionless eyes like portholes into nothingness.

The god Sephis was reborn, a malacostracan demon from another, darker world.

Dragoneer First Class Relkin of Quosh could think of many better ways of spending a precious four-week leave, but he had made a promise to his dragon. And so he found himself in a chill spring downpour, standing under a twisted pine tree on the slopes of Mt. Ulmo, staring out over an alpine meadow that was cloaked in cold fog.

It had rained for days. Relkin was damp, even under his Kenor freecoat with its thick waxed outer surface, which was proof against any single rain. He sighed audibly.

A tall, dark mass was visible in the meadow, a dragon, also in rain gear, with a waterproof mantle pulled around his neck keeping off the worst of the downpour.

They had been there for hours—the whole day to be precise, not to mention the day before and the day before that. In fact, they’d been coming to this forlorn spot for a full two weeks, and apart from the very first day, it had been just like this, cold, wet, and absolutely miserable.

There’d been nothing to eat but cold jerky and oats for a week, no company except a sulky dragon, and not even a fire since everything in the woods was soaked through and beyond the powers of even such a good fire starter as Relkin Orphanboy.

Worst of all was the knowledge that with a four-week leave, they could have gone much farther afield, perhaps all the way back to the coastal cities, where Relkin could have solved his biggest problem. Since he was under the age of sixteen, he was too young to be let into the military brothels, and General Paxion had made the morals of dragonboys and young soldiers alike a priority of his stewardship of Fort Dal-housie. Freelance trollops caught working outside the legal brothels were likely to get military justice, which had just about eliminated them from the district. Thus almost all opportunities for a fast maturing dragonboy to learn more of the mysteries of sex had disappeared. Of course, there were girls in the town, on nearby farms, and even in the fort, but their parents would not have them mixing with dragonboys, oh no, not for a moment. Dragonboys were all orphans, the dregs of the coastal cities, and who wanted such landless trash mixing with one’s daughters? Not the good citizenry of Dalhousie, that was for sure, even though those same good citizens depended on the courage and tenacity of those very same boys in battle.

A quick trip to the coast, to Marneri or even Talion, would have made all the difference. They could have taken a riverboat to Razac and then gone down the coast road. He could have done something about this obsession with the opposite sex, and they could both have enjoyed some warmer weather for a week or two, which would have made a fine antidote to the long hard winter they’d endured while attached to the 87th Marneri Dragons out at Fort Kenor.

Situated on the north flank of Mt. Kenor, overlooking the great river and the western plains, Fort Kenor was easily the least comfortable of all the forts in Kenor. The winds that ripped down the Gan from the High Plateau of Hazog were cold enough to go through two wool shirts and a freecoat with a fur lining.

But a promise was a promise, and dragons possessed keener memories than either men or elephants, so there was no getting out of it. And so he was here, watching a cold, wet, sulky dragon standing out there in the meadow waiting for the love of his life to fly in.

And, of course, there was no sign of her, nothing to indicate that a silky green dragoness was coming to this meadow high above the forest of Tunina.

Relkin had heard the story many times, of course. Whenever Bazil had had a barrel of beer or two. So he knew that on this very spot, Baz had fought the mighty wild dragon, the Purple Green of Hook Mountain, and won the favor of the green female. And that Baz was by now the male parent of one or more young dragons, crossbreeds between the wild and the wingless wyverns of Argonath. And finally that the lithe green female would return to meet Bazil when the young ones were hatched.

Alas, the wild female dragon had not come, and it didn’t look as though she was going to appear. Relkin would have a grouchy dragon on his hands for weeks to come. He sighed. It was enough to make a young man want to scream.

He looked up and noticed that the murk was darkening. The rain was falling more heavily than ever. He knew they’d never get a fire going, just another cold meal and then spend another miserable night sleeping under a rock overhang.

The big shape moved. Relkin shifted position. His right leg had almost gone to sleep. He shook it to dispel the pins and needles. Baz was giving up for the day. Relkin thanked the old gods and then reflexively begged the Great Mother’s pardon. Relkin was hopelessly mixed up when it came to religion.

The dragon’s demeanor was subdued when he drew close. “She will not come, I know this now,” he said in a mournful voice.

Relkin kept quiet. It was better not to say anything. The dragon put out a huge arm and rested a well-trimmed set of claws on the boy’s shoulder for a moment. A light touch, remarkable in a two-ton beast.

“Agh, it is all a waste! I am sorry boy, I one foolish dragon. She will not come.”

Relkin continued to keep a diplomatic silence, and together they groped their way back through the sopping wet woods to the overhang.

Woods rats had found their food. The jerky was ripped to pieces and scattered. The oats and wheat biscuit had been gnawed and ruined. Worst of all, the pot of akh had been licked completely clean. Relkin salvaged a few fragments for a meal. The dragon ate a pound of unspoiled oats and the rest of the jerky. Neither did much to stave off the pangs of hunger.