Bazil Broketail (15 page)

“Your tail was regrown, do you not remember?”

“No. No memory of this.” The tail tip was weird. It felt strong and flexible, it curled and snapped straight again with ease. And yet it looked quite broken.

Bazil was licking the air with his thick, forked tongue.

“Sir Dragon, you must keep moving. The poison will form in your muscles otherwise.”

“Yess, yess, yess.” Bazil rose and strode out of the stall. “No room in there to walk. We go and walk outside. The cold will keep me awake. I stay in here, I sleep.”

Lagdalen pulled her cloak around her and followed him out. Together they paced up Dragons Walk towards the Tower of Guard. As they went Bazil plied her with questions.

When he inquired about Relkin she told him that the boy was in the tower, where the Lady had had him removed for further observation.

“But boy Relkin is alive? You know Relkin?”

“Oh yes, Sir Dragon. Relkin is very dear to me.”

“Ah hah! So fool boy is addled by some wandering wizard who then tries to kill an honest leatherback from Quosh.”

The boy bewitched, the dragon poisoned. Bah! It was just as the old tales told it.

“Why did this wizard do these things?”

“I do not know, Sir Dragon. I am only a novice in the Temple Service.”

A memory pulsed back to life. A novice and a pile of horse manure in the stables.

“Yess,
I
remember now, you are Lagdalen. You help us get the dragon stamp. You good friend of Bazil of Quosh.”

“Thank you, Sir Dragon.”

The big eyes shuttered momentarily.

They’d reached the top of the Dragons Walk beneath the battlements of the Chapter House. The mass of the Tower of Guard loomed just beyond.

“We can walk up to the gate.
I
will wait outside while you go in and find out how my dragonboy is doing.”

“Certainly, Sir Dragon.”

“More of the red wine, my darling Thrembode?” gushed the Princess Besita.

He nodded. “Of course, it goes excellently with these ribs, and this sauce! Mmm, but it is magnificent. Not even in Kadein have I had a sauce that was better.”

“How wonderful,” said Besita happily.

The Princess Besita was having fun. What a night it was turning out to be!

First she had captured the dark, handsome Thrembode the New and taken him from Lariga Tesouan’s evening party at the Tesouan house on Tower Hill. Besita knew that Lariga had designs on the dashing Thrembode herself, and to have scotched her rival while at the same time obtaining the company of Thrembode for the rest of the night was a triumph to be savored.

Next she had prevailed upon her servants to produce a marvelous supper, largely from the kitchens of the Blue Pike Restaurant, it was true; but nonetheless, it had put Thrembode in a terrific mood.

She was sure he had quite forgiven her for the horrible interruption they had suffered two nights previously.

She was wearing her most revealing evening gown, a green silk confection cut in the saucy Kadein style with a deep décolletage, a tight waist and a snug fit over the hips. Dancing across her breasts was a string of pearls, a family heirloom, and from her ears hung pendulous clusters of pink and blue pearls, further pieces of her inheritance from Queen Losset.

She poured the wine into his goblet and their eyes met once more. Forthrightly she stared him down.

“Oh, impious man!” she giggled as his eyes roamed down her body very, very slowly.

“My princess!” He raised the goblet and sipped the wine.

Damn, but it was good wine, he thought to himself. From Kadein, he expected. Marneri wines were all white, all hard and steely with the chill of the north. They couldn’t make red wine worth drinking this far from the southern sun. Something about being on the wrong side of the continent, no warm currents. It got too cold in winter and froze their damn vines.

Drinking Kadein wines made him long for that great city of the sun. He’d take Kadein over Marneri any day. Hell, he’d take Kadein over any city he’d known, and he’d lived in six.

Ah well, there was no point in wallowing in regret. At least he’d been posted in the Argonath once again.

He looked at the wine in his goblet.

Damn, it was a lot better than anything you could get to drink in the lair of the Masters! But then the Masters frowned on all the pleasures of the flesh. Cold water, served at “room temperature” in their ice-cold cells— that was all they ever drank.

“You have no princess in your distant homeland?” asked Besita in a mock little-girl voice.

He chuckled. It was not entirely a pleasant sound.

“No, there are no princesses for me there.”

Indeed, the very idea of such a thing as a princess in the cold dark world of Padmasa was a laugh in itself.

“Then I am your only princess?”

“You are my only princess.”

“Good.” She wriggled back onto her chair. Thrembode imagined her large, soft posterior in his hands and felt himself harden. Curious how he could be attracted to such a northern dumpling. Admittedly this was business first and not pleasure, but still he was oddly aroused by this fleshy, pale creature, so unlike his usual favorites—Ourdhi slave women.

The smug look on her face informed him that he was expected to stay the night. By the cold bowels of the demon Uruk, these northern women were sexy enough but hellishly arrogant. Especially these trollops of Argonath. What airs and graces they gave themselves. The Masters would take pleasure in humbling such overweening pride. All of them would be given to the imp breeders in time.

A part of Thrembode actually felt sad at the thought. They were good for tumbling and he would miss their sheer, exuberant enthusiasm for sexual pleasure. Ourdhi slave women were submissive to the point of boredom sometimes—there was no resistance there, no will to stir one’s juices.

“It is so wonderful to have you here, my darling Thrembode,” whispered Besita in a husky voice.

“Mmmm,” he said, while his eyes lingered on her cleavage.

However, while he knew that she was itching to be seized and carried into the bedroom in his strong, virile arms, at that moment he was more concerned with her mind than with her voluptuous body.

Their conversation had touched upon the Black Mirror incident that had sundered them so unsatisfactorily two nights before. Trying not to seem too overeager, Thrembode had closed in on the subject.

“You know, I am still filled with fascination for this mirror business. As a professional magician you must understand that these things, these great works of the witches, are enormously interesting. I look upon them as the greatest works of an art in which I am, alas, but a simple journeyman, tricking out the juggler’s act.”

Besita squeezed herself back onto her seat.

“Well, it is a secret, you know. Really, I shouldn’t have told you anything about it…”

“Oh, my most beloved princess,” Thrembode began in his most humble and ingratiating tone. “You know that I am a loyal subject of the empire. I would never dream of repeating anything I heard from your lovely lips.”

“Am I really your most beloved?” she said at once, her eyes alight.

“Of course, my dear. But tell me, who was this person who came through the mirror?”

She clucked at him. “Silly you, I didn’t think I’d have to tell you that. Everyone knows that! It was Lessis, the Grey Lady of Valmes.”

“Oh my goodness,” he said. “Well, better not say any more. I had no idea.”

The Grey Lady, the great hag herself! Oh, but that was a mighty name. The hair on the nape of his neck rose involuntarily.

Once, not long ago, he had almost fallen into a classic trap that had been set for a network of agents in Kadein. By great good fortune Thrembode had been late in making contact with the circle, who were all arrested and interrogated by Lessis herself. She had been behind the penetration of the network, and with the knowledge gleaned from it had discovered the base system itself. The controllers of the two other nets in Kadein were also taken as a result.

Thrembode had slipped out of Kadein that same day, taking a salt fish junk to the Guano Isles. Six months he’d spent there, in the frightful stink of the guano mines, before he dared ship back to Argonath.

He’d landed in Bea and immediately received orders to proceed to Troat to observe the dragon Smilgax and see that it went to Marneri. The plot against King Sanker was ripening quickly.

Thrembode was immensely relieved to learn that the debacle in Kadein had not rubbed off on him. Other agents had not been so lucky. They’d been ordered back to Tummuz Orgmeen for “review.” He shuddered at the thought of what could happen then. The Blunt Doom was sometimes capricious but always cruel.

Still his brush with the Grey Lady had given him the worst fright of his career. He finished the wine and concealed his shiver of fear.

Besita’s expression had changed meanwhile, happy lust replaced by a positively fatuous look of heroine worship.

“Do you know that when the Lady came through the mirror I felt that a great truth had been opened to me? A truth that had lain unnoticed for most of my life.”

“Really?” said Thrembode.

“Yes, she made me see, by her example, that our cause is the cause of all that is just and good. And she made me realize how big a thing it is, the empire I mean. The building of the Argonath is like one of
the
great epics of the ancients.”

“Well, of course,” murmured Thrembode. Yegods! The simplicity of the woman!

“I have never realized before, for some reason, that I was just so caught up in all our petty little local troubles. That the world is so much more important.”

He whistled to himself. It was pure propaganda, like that recited by children in the Temple indoctrination classes.

“So what if we have to negotiate a reduction in tax rates?” she burbled on. “All those things must be harmonized and made simpler. Increasing trade in the Argonath is a necessity—it is important for the whole empire.”

The happy stupidity in her voice grated on his ears and he imagined the likely end of all these people in the Argonath once the conquest was completed, and he heard the dread laughter echo within him.

Fools! They were doomed. They were grains to be ground between the millstones of much greater powers. The Masters were the mightiest of all and in time would lay claim to all the world. It was forewritten in the stones. The Masters represented a full Rook on the Sphereboard of Destiny; they would move soon. Worlds would tremble beneath their sway.

But he betrayed none of this, keeping his bland smile in place and nodding to encourage her rambling.

And Besita loved the sound of her own voice, especially after a few glasses of wine. Eventually he slipped a question into the proceedings.

“What I can’t imagine is why the Grey Lady would take such a dangerous route to come to Marneri.”

Besita swallowed her wine. “Oh, there’s going to be war next summer. In Kenor.”

She blurted it out so easily it might have been anything but a state secret. She seemed quite unaffected by the thought of war. But then Kenor was a long way away and he doubted she thought it could ever involve her. Fools! Such a casual attitude to security. Give her a secret by noon and the entire world would know it by two in the afternoon.

He cringed mentally at the thought of what would happen to someone who blabbed thus and was caught within the labyrinth of Padmasa.

They’d be fed to a Thingweight. The feeding from the dark, the withering, the agony of it, oh yes, he’d seen it. A teacher from the sophistry school, plucked out one day and taken away. The fellow was put up in a cage, not far from the school gate, and one could watch him as he was consumed from within over the next couple of weeks. Such were the ways of the Masters with those who weakened or betrayed them.

But this was important news. No doubt of that.

“War? With whom—the Teetol?”

“Yes, and the enemy, the great enemy again. Long had we thought that menace stilled forever. But now we learn that the Doom is at work out there somewhere, and it promises bloody war upon the colonies in Kenor.”

Thrembode made a face. This sounded like news that should be sent at once to Tummuz Orgmeen. If the filthy grey hags knew there was to be fighting in Kenor next summer, then the Doom should be told.

He fluttered his hands like a helpless artist.

“Oh my. I think I will take myself back to the southern territories in the spring, then. I am not one for war—a nasty, brutish business. I do not recommend it to you, my princess.”

“Thrembode.” She extended a pudgy hand for him to kiss. “You care about your princess, don’t you?”

She wore three ruby rings on her fingers.

“Of course, of course.”

He kissed the rings.

“Well, Thrembode, the war will be a long way off, I mean Kenor is a month’s hard riding away. The war will not affect how we live here. So you can plan on staying for as long as you like. Don’t you want to stay with your beloved princess?”

“Mmmm, you know I do.”

She was leaning over the table once more, her heavy bosom very close to his face, her eyes shining.

“My darling Thrembode,” she said in a husky voice.

“My beloved princess.”

She glanced toward the bedchamber. She could scarcely wait, he thought.

Later he recalled that the Temple bells were ringing out for midnight when he laid her on the bed.

Besita whispered, “Now I want to make full amends for what happened last time,” and then she pulled him down beside her. She was insatiable, or so it seemed for a while, but eventually she slept, exhausted with pleasuring.

He lay back against the mounded pillows and crossed his fingers over his stomach. He was well satisfied with himself. The big day was upon them, the Smilgax mission would be completed and it would be time to move to the next phase. The bewitching of Erald.

Erald should prove easy enough. He had already shown a taste for somewhat extreme sex practices. Thrembode knew such regions well; he would find the perfect bait.

He looked around to see if there was any wine left. There was. He poured it into his goblet and returned to bed and balanced it on his chest. All was well with the world.