A Sword for a Dragon (31 page)

It was a moment’s work to tear away the gag and cut her free. She was staring at him with astonished eyes.

“Relkin? It
is
you. I thought I heard your voice. Thought I was dreaming.”

Relkin hugged her hard.

“How in the name of the Mother did you find me?”

“Now that is a long story. Maybe we should talk about it while we move.”

“Has the enemy army landed yet?” said Lagdalen.

“You knew about that?”

“I heard them talking about it this afternoon when they were making me take a bath in milk. They didn’t realize that I understand their language.”

“Hey, me and Baz were going to be sacrificed, too.”

She stared at him in shock.

“I have a friend on the inside, you might say. She helped me get free. I found Baz, and we busted out, climbed up here, and got you out.”

“Sounds like the Relkin of old. Getting someone into trouble.”

“I earned her favor honestly enough, Lagdalen of the Tarcho.”

The dragon leaned close. “What did they do to Lagdalen, dragon friend?”

“Well, actually nothing much, except for not giving me anything to eat.”

“They do that to dragon, too. Terrible thing.”

Now they could hear screams resounding from the woods on the western side of the ziggurat.

“It sounds like we should get out of here.”

They went down the main stair on the south face of the ziggurat as quickly as they could. Ahead of them were the high priestesses, with Zettila in their midst, scampering down a walk to a dock. They followed them, moving along quickly, keeping to the shadows.

The moon rode high above a ghastly scene. The isle of Gingo-La was overrun by an army of men with dead eyes, whose will was not their own. Among these men strode giants with blank faces, whose flesh was mere mud, but mud instilled with terrible strength.

Together they crushed and dispersed the small force of guards who tried to block their way near the ziggurat of the goddess. The giants moved like bizarre automatons, with the knees rising high, prancing in unison. Spears sank into them, but did no lasting damage. Swords cut deep, but could not stop them. They wielded heavy clubs and axes with which they dashed out the brains of men who stood against them.

Through the gardens, they moved in a swift rapacious horde. Crowds of women thronging the docks were suddenly assaulted by men swarming out of the trees. A sudden eruption of screaming cut the night.

Now a scene of cruel pandemonium broke out. The men forced the women into a tight group. Then they were pulled out in ones and twos, and formed into a line while the collars of slavery were clasped around their necks. Finally they were urged westwards under the crack of the lash in the hands of gangs of imps, the dwarfish minions produced by the Dark Masters of Padmasa in their places in the High Hazog. These particular imps were heavily built and very pale of hue. They wore the black uniform of Sephis, and they cracked their whips with absurd gusto. The ships at dockside hurriedly cut their ropes, and the oarsmen pulled away with frantic haste. Perhaps two-thirds of the women on the island were aboard the barks and galleys, but hundreds had been left behind.

Only now did the highborn captives comprehend what was happening to them. They had been captured and given over to the control of imps. It could only mean that they were to be transported to the White Bones Mountains, to the city of Axoxo. There they would be imp mothers until they died, their bodies worn out by constant impregnation.

Their piteous wails rang off the ziggurat of the goddess, who, alas, was unable to stretch forth her hand to save them. Fervent prayers went unanswered, and they were marched away to the waiting rafts where they would begin the nightmarish voyage to their terrible destination.

Forewarned, Bazil, Relkin, and Lagdalen avoided the port, and instead made straight for the riverside through an extensive garden with raised beds of flowers, immaculate lawns, and lush orchards.

Through the gardens were scattered fragments of the gorgeous clothing of the priestesses, a sleeve hanging from a rosebush there, a train sparkling with points of brilliance there.

At one point, they heard screams and looked back to see a group of men running from a squad of giants who moved with a strange high-stepping unity, as if they were enormous puppets. They virtually danced as they went with a ponderous kind of grace. Over their shoulders they carried heavy clubs. The men and the giants disappeared into an orchard where only the giants’ heads could be seen above the trees, bouncing up and down in the bright moonlight.

Bazil wondered if he was hallucinating.

“They look like men, not troll,‘” he said slowly.

Relkin too was baffled. “No troll I’ve ever seen before.”

“Not troll, look like men, almost walk like men. Troll walk like bear.”

“I don’t know what they are, but there’s an awful lot of them. I counted twelve, how about you?”

Sudden screams came from the orchard where the prancing giants had begun to catch up on the fleeing guards. The huge clubs rose and fell.

Bazil remembered that he had no real sword, only the slender blade taken from Rozaw, the guard.

“Too many for us I think. Better we leave.”

“But there are no boats,” said Lagdalen pointing to the empty shoreline. The gardens gave way to a sandy beach and then the river, gleaming under the moon’s light.

“We swim,” said Bazil.

“But it’s miles, and there could be crocodiles.”

“Crocodile tastes good I am told, even raw. Like chicken.”

The dragon held up the guardsman’s sword, as if it were a kitchen knife. Lagdalen hesitated briefly and then recalled what these dragons were like when aroused to combat. This confidence was perhaps well-founded. She shrugged. “I suppose there isn’t any other way.”

The bouncing heads were turning in their direction now. Relkin urged them to hurry. The giants were prancing toward them through the small trees.

They ran down the beach and into the waters of the great river, which was cold with the spring flood. Relkin and Lagdalen hesitated when they ran in it up to their knees.

“It’s so cold,” said Lagdalen.

The dragon, of course, found it delightful and had already splashed in and floated away, powering itself with sweeps of the great tail.

Relkin looked back. The giants, which he saw now were at least ten foot tall, were prancing through the gardens toward them.

The water was cold and there was a current, but Relkin was a good swimmer and he knew that Baz, like most wyverns, was a real aquanaut. Lagdalen, too, was quite capable in the water.

They paused to tread water and look back. The giants strode the beach but did not enter the water. They turned and pranced along the water’s edge, heading north. The noise from the northern end of the island was beginning to taper off as most of the captured women were marched away across the island by the imps.

The remaining captives, mostly servants and guards, were stripped, bound, and prepared for their own, shorter journey to hell. In groups of fifty, they were driven in the path of the women to the transports waiting to take them to Dzu.

Bazil floated easily in the water, cool with the spring torrents from the north. Like most wyverns, he was well at home in the aquatic environment. Perhaps some strain from the sea monsters of old had found its way into the wyvern line, but they were powerful swimmers and could cover long distances with little difficulty. Nor did cold water trouble them. In fact, they relished it.

When they tired, Lagdalen and Relkin rode on the dragon’s back. Although they were wet and cold, they still found it possible to marvel at the wonder of this journey, riding across a vast river in the dark, with the full moon illuminating everything with a silvery powder. The dragon drove on through the water like some unusually energetic and enormous crocodile.

The Oon was so enormous that out on its breadth they lost sight of any land, except islets that marked the many shoals. Eventually, even the leatherback dragon tired. They paused for a while at one of the more accessible islets.

While they first were in the water, they had seen a number of sails, both those of the small barks of the priestesses of Gingo-La and others, more rakish, usually dark, on narrow boats crammed with men, that pursued the barks. After a while, these craft drew away and they swam on alone.

The islet was very modest, perhaps forty feet in length. There were a handful of skeleton trees, none taller than ten foot, and a beacon, a polished brass globe atop a twenty-foot pole that was visible on moonlit nights and warned of the shoals around the islet.

They had not been there long before they spied a sail and watched its rapid approach. It was a two-masted Ourdhi bark, and it was running in front of the breeze and aiming very close to the shoals. Behind it they saw a long black galley that, when it drew closer, they could see was crammed with men. The oars were rising and falling at a tremendous rate. The galley was gaining on the small ship.

It seemed they were fated to witness the ship’s capture and the apprehension of more of Ourdh’s highborn women by the agents of the Masters, but then with shocking suddenness, the speeding galley struck the shoal and rocked to a halt. Oars and spars flew up with the impact, the bow broke asunder, and the ship sank quickly in about ten feet of water.

Bazil sighed. “We going to have company here pretty soon,” he said wearily.

“I think we’d better swim,” said Lagdalen.

They returned to the water and resumed their progress eastwards. Out on the river, ahead of them, sped the bark, saved by its risky passage of the shoals. The passengers, fortunate indeed not to have been taken by the pirates, who would have sold them to Sephis, would be in the great city before dawn.

The swimmers would take longer, but they would get to the eastern shore. When Bazil tired again, they allowed themselves to float downstream for a while before resuming the thrust to the east.

As they went, Relkin tried to place the events he had witnessed on the island into the situation in Ourdh as he understood it.

“This may seem like a strange question to you, but nobody has ever told me what it is exactly that we’re fighting here. What is this thing they call Sephis? Is it really the god brought back to life?”

Lagdalen hesitated. “The Lady Ribela told me that she thought it was a demon. It might have been trapped here by the enemy’s magic and forced to do their will.”

Relkin shivered. As always, the doings of the dark power made him profoundly uneasy, but this was peculiarly terrifying. The Masters had power even over great demons. The idea made the hair on his neck stand up. His mind flashed back to the strange humanlike giants, with their high-stepping jerky movements. What were they?

They went on without speaking while the moon sank to the horizon and the stars were left to shine with merciless brilliance. Relkin fell to thinking of the future. He had survived the servants of an alien goddess, and the thought had occurred to him that the Great Mother must have some special interest in him because she put him in great danger time after time and always got him out of it. But why would she pick on him, an orphan child of an obscure village on the Argonath coast? He had not been born high enough to be worthy of her favor. Worse, he was not devout, not in the least. He’d barely gone to the Temple once he was old enough to know he didn’t have to. He invoked the old gods, the donoi gods, whenever he required the assistance of the heavens, and you weren’t supposed to do that, they always told you in the Temple School.

But perhaps what some scholars said was true, and the old donoi gods were actually aspects of the Mother, misperceived by men. This idea had been used to keep alive their names even to the day of the Empire of the Rose and the rule of the witches.

His favorite was Caymo, the god of wine and of song and good times in general. Caymo was a brown-skinned god with a white beard and a bald head and a prodigious belly in which he could put away enormous quantities of wine. Then there was Vok, the god of the ocean and shipping. And then there were harsher gods, like Asgah of war and Gongo of the death ride. Relkin really thought of them collectively, as just “the old gods” or sometimes as the “donoi gods.”

Whether they existed or not, some deity seemed still to have some purpose for him. Why else would Miranswa have been sent to free him? Why else would he have survived at Tummuz Orgmeen when they faced insurmountable odds? There had to be some purpose. But what it might be, he could not say, and he wondered if he ever would.

His thoughts of eventual retirement and of life as a farmer on the frontier seemed now perhaps too conventional. Possibly he should aim higher. Perhaps he should seek advancement beyond serving as a dragoneer. He could apply to the schools of wizardry. He would go to the eastern isle then and learn the great arts.

Then he remembered his dragon still cheerfully thrusting forward through the cool waters right beneath him, and he felt ashamed. How could he even dream of abandoning the broketail dragon? They were bonded together until the death of one or the other. Even in retirement they would stay together, forming an economic unit on the frontier.

Besides that, they were still hundreds of miles from home and caught up in a huge war with unknown consequences. It was possible he’d never live to see Kenor again, let alone retire there.

The sky brightened in the east, and dawn broke over the world of water and sky. Bazil rested on an-other islet, and soon after that they glimpsed the eastern shore of the great river.

They waded ashore, exhausted and cold, on a muddy flat bordered by a forest of palms and skeleton trees. They were hungry and worn. Relkin scouted the forest to discover a muddy track that wound away northwards.

The countryside here was the usual mix of small fields and mud-brick villages, plus a number of villas of all sizes up to places that were virtually palaces.

One thing was common to all, however, they were empty. The land was denuded of its people.