Dragon Venom (Obsidian Chronicles Book 3) (17 page)

Arlian could hardly argue with that; he had wondered earlier how Zaner intended to join them at table. It appeared he didn't.

"Wolt, find someone to escort our friend Tooth to my study,"

Arlian said. "I believe he might appreciate a chance to speak to Isein—in private, but let his escort wait by the door. And send my steward down to dine with us, if you would." Arlian suspected that Zaner would prefer privacy while discussing the details of the cleansing spell with the Aritheian magician. Isein could not perform the ritual herself, but she had seen it done, and had assisted Oeshir and Lilsinir, she would be able to tell Zaner what was involved.

As for the escort, he did not yet trust Zaner enough to leave him unattended so close to any Aritheian magician.

Wolt bowed. "Of course, my lord."

A grateful Zaner turned and followed Wolt back up the first flight of stairs, while Arlian made his way to the dining hall.

That hall was perhaps the largest room in the Grey House, but no less gloomy than any other; the vaulted ceiling was unadorned stone, the tapestries on the stone walls had long since faded into beige incom-prehensibility, and the massive oaken table was blackened with age. Its primary virtue was providing a place sufficiently formal that guests would not presume, simply because they had been admitted, that they were being welcomed into Arlian's home as friends.

There he found Lady Tiria seated at the foot of the great black table, with three or four servants standing uncomfortably about the room.

"I thought you were in Tooth's company, my lord," Tiria said, as Arlian bowed to her. "That was what your man said."

"Indeed I was, but I'm afraid he was called away on some urgent matter," Arlian replied. He turned to the most senior of the hovering servants—his chief footman, as it happened, a man not much younger than the retiring Ferrezin and soon to replace Ferrezin as chamberlain.

"Venlin, would you see that some supper is taken up to my study, for Isein and her new assistant? I believe it would be best if they ate there, rather than interrupt their work."

Venlin bowed, and hurried into the kitchen, out of sight.

"Isein?" Tiria asked, accepting a wineglass from the tray a footman offered.

"A guest," Arlian replied, making his way to the head of the table.

"One of my employees. She has been in my service many years now, and I consider her a friend. She is upstairs, attending to certain urgent business."

"The name is a curious one," Tiria said, turning the wineglass in her hand and eyeing the length of the table between herself and her host.

The distance was not unmanageable—the table was meant to seat ten—

but neither was it conducive to romantic whispers.

"I believe the name is Aritheian," Arlian said.

"Ah! And is Isein Aritheian, then? One of your famous magicians?"

"You are as clever as you are beautiful, my lady," Arlian said, lifting his own wineglass as he seated himself.

"I would like to meet her. I'm fascinated by Aritheian magic!"

Arlian smiled. Of course she was interested in the Aritheians—she had been sent to kill them. Isein was not trained in the physician's arts, and had never learned Oeshir's cleansing spell, but Tiria would not know that and might well not care about such distinctions. "Perhaps it can be arranged at some point, but her studies are at a critical stage tonight," Arlian said. He was not about to allow Tlria in the same room with any of her intended targets. Indeed, he would need to send warnings to the others at the first opportunity,before he allowed Tiria to leave, and make certain that all the Aritheians were provided with guards.

In fact, if he could find an excuse to leave her presence for a moment, he would attend to it immediately.

He turned at the sound of voices and clattering cutlery from the kitchen, and when he turned back he saw his steward standing in the far doorway, dressed in the black and white household livery and wearing the gold seal of his office around his neck for the occasion.

Arlian had not seen the seal in years, and had not been sure it still existed. "Ah, Black! Do join us!" he called.

"Of course, my lord," Black said. "I have taken the liberty of sending my children to eat in the kitchen, however."

That explained the giggling Arlian could hear from the kitchen.

"And your wife?"

"I thought it best she keep an eye on her daughters."

"Then I fear it will be just the three of us, my lady; I can have your plate brought to another seat, if you would prefer, so that we need not shout at one another."

Tiria smiled a smile Arlian supposed was meant to be seductive, but to his rather jaundiced eye she did not quite have the womanly grace yet to manage anything more than a rather forced play fulness.

Perhaps in a few years she would do better—if she lived a few years, and did not distort her growth by becoming host to an embryonic dragon.

"I would be delighted," she said, rising. "I almost said something when your man seated me, but I did not want to presume."

A moment later Tiria was settled on Arlian's left and Black on his right, at one end of the table, while footmen set bowls of steaming tur-tle soup before them.

Tiria and Arlian spoke at length as the meal progressed, but Black limited his contributions to the conversation to occasional wry comments. Tiria coaxed Arlian into describing dragons' lairs, and the killing of their occupants, in some detail; he was unsure whether her interest was sincere, or simply carrying through on her alleged reason for taking an interest in him.

He described burning the venom from the cave walls, and Tiria's expression changed from her usual attentive smile to poorly suppressed shock.

"You know, I suppose," she said, "that in some circles that venom might bring as much as three hundred ducats for a single drop."

"So I have heard," Arlian replied, smiling, and knowing that his smile was cruel. This woman, hardly more than a girl, had become an assassin, had bartered away her ethics and perhaps her life, for a chance at such a drop.

"They say that even that little, just a single drop mixed in human blood, is enough to bestow the heart of the dragon."

"So they say," Arlian said. "In my own experience, the dose mixed in my grandfather's blood was considerably more than a single drop. It had eaten the flesh from his face and dissolved his left eye down to the bony socket before it dripped into my mouth."

Tiria swallowed, her face suddenly pale, and put down her fork.

"Ah, my apologies!" Arlian said, feeling a curious mix of vindictive pleasure and genuine remorse at her obvious discomfort. "This is no way to speak when dining with a beautiful lady! We should be speaking of life and beauty, not death and disfigurement."

"Yes," Tiria said, looking down at the fish on her plate but not picking up her discarded fork.

"Let us say no more about the foul dragons and their loathsome servants, the human incubators impregnated with their masters' monstrous spawn. Surely, there is something more pleasant that interests you?"

"But not all of them are loathsome," she protested, her eyes rising from the plate to meet his. "I... I have met a dragonheart, in Gallows Hill, and she seemed entirely charming—and of course, are you not an unwilling carrier of a dragon's offspring?"

"I have that disgrace," Arlian agreed. "It shames me that I have not yet taken advantage of the miracles of Aritheian magic to have the taint removed from my flesh, but I find the advantages it gives me too useful in the pursuit of my war against the perpetrators of this abomination. I will yield it up in time, when I am sure that the war can be successfully prosecuted without it—or when the war has been successfully prosecuted, and the dragons are no more."

"But you aren't at all loathsome or unclean, my lord!"

"How little you know him," Black muttered around a mouthful of bread.

"But think of the advantages it gives you! A lifespan a dozen times greater than we ordinary mortals, immunity to poison and disease . . ."

"Sterility, and a deadening of the emotions ..

"... that superhuman charm—why, I can hardly keep from flinging my arms around you! And they say that dragonhearts are stronger and faster than mere men, and gifted in sorcery ..."

"Sorcery is but a matter of study and practice," Arlian said. "As for the rest, I cannot say whether there is any truth to it, but I think it a poor trade for the knowledge that one has a monster growing in one's heart."

"A monster that will only emerge after a thousand years,"

"Even a thousand years will pass in the end, and I would rather leave posterity a better legacy than one more vicious beast."

"I cannot even imagine the world a thousand years hence!"

"Nonetheless, it will come about."

"And what if, after nine hundred years, a dragonheart submits to the Aritheian rituals? Is that not the best of all worlds, living so very long, yet destroying the unborn dragon before it can do any harm?"

"It may be; I really cannot say. I am also uncertain whether those Aritheian rituals will still be known centuries from now. I believe the Dragon Society would like to see every Aritheian magician in the Lands of Man slain."

That was perhaps a dangerous direction for the conversation, coming as close as it did to Tiria's actual purpose in Manfort, and indeed, she did throw Arlian a sideways glance before apparently deciding it was mere coincidence.

"Well, what if they were slain?" Tiria asked. "Surely, more could be brought from Arithei."

"And of course, they would be delighted to come," Black said. "After all, simply because their predecessors were murdered ..."

Tiria's sharp glance cut short his sarcasm; then she turned back to Arlian. "But wouldn't they come?" she asked. "If they were paid enough, given enough reason?"

"Indeed, given enough people, there are often fools who assume they will survive what their fellows could not," Arlian agreed. "But Arithei is a small country, and not every Aritheian is a magician, and not every magician knows the cleansing rituals. The secret could well be lost, in time."

Tiria looked sincerely troubled. "Do you think so?"

Arlian studied her for a moment, his fork poised in midair.

Obviously, she had intended to pursue exactly the course she had described—pay for a dose of dragon venom and blood, spend nine hundred years enjoying the benefits of its effects, and then have her full humanity restored, the infant dragon removed and killed. She had intended to pay for her prize in Aritheian blood, rather than golden ducats, but otherwise . . .

The loss of fertility and the chilling of her emotions did not seem to trouble her at all—but that was hardly surprising; Arlian had encountered that often enough in the past. Many people did not appear to believe in the emotional effects at all, and sacrificing unborn progeny seemed a small enough price.

"You realize, of course," he said, "that the dragons themselves do not want their young to be cast out and destroyed?"

"Of course they don't," she agreed, "but what can they do?"

"Quite a bit," Black said.

"We have your obsidian weapons to protect us," Tiria continued, ignoring the steward.

Arlian took a bite of fish and chewed it thoroughly, then swallowed and said, "The dragons, ancient though they are, still have centuries to find ways around our defenses and prevent us from destroying their spawn."

"And we have centuries to counter them. Really, Lord Obsidian, I think you underrate human ingenuity!"

"Rather, I think you forget that there are humans working on the dragons' behalf, and they are no less ingenious than the Aritheian magicians, or whoever else might conspire to cleanse dragonhearts of their corruption."

"No, I . . . Tiria stopped, fork raised, as she realized that she was one of the people working on the dragons' behalf.

Arlian smiled at her. "A thousand years ago, at the very start of the rebellion against the dragons' rule and the beginning of the first Man-Dragon War, there was a group that learned how the dragons reproduce, and set about to put an eventual end to the dragons by the simple expedient of killing all the dragonhearts," he said. "This Order of the Dragon, as they called themselves, did not know of any way to kill dragons—the secret of obsidian was only discovered a quarter-century ago—

but they could kill dragonhearts easily enough, and they did so, hoping that their distant descendants might be free of their draconic masters.

The Man-Dragon Wars were the result, as the dragons struggled to produce dragonhearts faster than the Order could kill them."

"What?" Tiria said. "I never heard that!"

"Of course not," Arlian said. "It was kept secret. If everyone had known that the Order existed, and what it was doing, then the dragonhearts would have hidden themselves away, or fought back. And if the secret of how the dragons breed had been revealed, then there would have been hundreds, perhaps thousands, of eager volunteers lining up to drink the venomous elixir, trading their humanity for a thousand years of life. The Order revealed nothing—and neither did the dragons or their servants, for they were unsure who would win in the end if the conflict were to be entirely out in the open. Both sides preferred the real war to be fought surreptitiously, while the famous battles our legends recall were meaningless distractions."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Because I want you to consider that what we see around us now is only the latest phase in a conflict that has been going on since the dawn of history. We had a respite of seven hundred years because Lord Enziet betrayed and murdered the Order of the Dragon, then blackmailed the dragons into withdrawing into their caverns beneath the earth—and the dragons agreed because they knew they would outlive him. To them, that seven-hundred-year pause we call the Years of Man was trivial."

He leaned back in his chair.

"Now, do you really think that creatures that have fought to dominate humanity for so very long, creatures that can plan seven centuries ahead, creatures who managed to subvert a member of the Order of the Dragon and lead him to murdering his companions, won't have devised some way to ensure that most of their young are born on schedule?"