Dragon Venom (Obsidian Chronicles Book 3) (31 page)

From there, Arlian turned northward to Shei, where a council of thirteen wizards ruled over a reasonably healthy human population. No human magicians were permitted, nor were magical protections such as those on Arlian's wagon; he left the wagon and oxen, as well as his three companions, at the border while he ventured into the council's territory.

The wizards were sufficiently civilized and curious to grant Arlian a brief and unsatisfactory audience, which was largely spent arguing over whether the Lands of Man would be better off ruled by wizards than by the current mix of humans and dragons. Arlian was relieved that the wizards eventually agreed to disagree, and made no effort to change his opinion with anything other than words.

Still alone and on foot he crossed from Shei through the roadless jungles south of Skok's Falls to the city-state of Kaltai Ol, where the magicians had taken charge of their environment by learning spells that allowed them to enslave nightstalkers, which were then used to defend them from all other dangers. Arlian was initially intrigued by the concept, and wondered about the possibility of scaling the spells up to control dragons, until he discovered that the magicians had been unable to alter the nightstalkers' diet. The women of Kaltai Ol were kept perpetually pregnant to ensure a steady supply of surplus babies, whose brains were fed to the nightstalkers.

Arlian did not consider this acceptable, and said so, emphasizing his displeasure with his sword. He killed three of the eight court magicians before fleeing from some two dozen of their outraged and pregnant wives.

From there, rather than make his way through the jungles, he

returned to the Borderlands—or at any rate, the lands that had once been north of the border, and had not yet been claimed by any other government. There he turned east once more, then south, revisiting Shei before returning to his wagon and rejoining the three companions he had left there.

In Arlian's absence Double had contracted a fever, so that the guard had spent several days lying in the wagon, soaked in sweat and tended by Poke and Uilieh; he was still shaky when Arlian returned. Arlian therefore postponed further exploration until he had delivered Uilieh safely back to her home in Arithei, and left Double in Theyani to recover his health while he and Poke ventured further into unknown lands.

All in all, Arlian spent some nineteen months exploring the lands beyond the border before finally concluding that there was nothing more of use to be learned there.

He knew more than he had ever expected to learn about the nature of magic and blood and power and all the myriad forms they could take, but the secret he needed, it seemed, must lie in dragon venom itself. No other still-existent magical essence could produce such consistent results, or bind power so long and so well. No other surviving creature had any equivalent.

A god's blood could apparently engender magical creatures of immense power and duration, if the leech-god of Tirikindaro could be believed, or at any rate bestow longevity on existing creatures, but there were no living gods left in the world, so far as anyone knew, and therefore no possible source. If Arlian could find a god . . .

But he could not, and that meant that if he sought to create something that would restrain the magic of the Lands of Man in a stable, long-term form, the only means available was dragon venom. If he sought to achieve it without the continued presence of dragons, then it seemed he would need to find a way to make their venom produce something other than a new dragon.

That seemed unlikely, to say the least, but it appeared to be his only hope.

And if he was to have any hope of achieving it, he would need to experiment with dragon venom—which, obviously, was not available beyond the border.

Therefore at long last he returned to Arithei, where he reloaded his battered wagon, hitched up his weary oxen, and late in the warm and snowless southern winter he headed north into the Dreaming Mountains once again, with a fully recovered Double on the bench beside him and Poke walking alongside. No Aritheians accompanied him; Isein, having been warmly welcomed by her clan, had changed her mind about the relative merits of Theyani and Manfort and preferred to remain in her homeland, while Uilieh simply had no business in the Lands of Man, and no interest in going there.

The trio of northerners, now experienced in the ways of the magical realms, made good time. Three weeks took them past Sweetwater, and up the canyon into the Desolation.

27

The Gate at Stonebreak

The Gate at Stonebreak

The first sign Arlian saw of the changes that had taken place in the two years since his departure was the great iron gate, blocking the road in the defile leading down from the Desolation to the town of Stonebreak.

The summer sun shone brightly on a black iron framework supporting a stone wall that had been built across the narrow canyon from side to side, to a height of twelve or fifteen feet. At the center two twenty-foot towers flanked two massive iron panels, each some ten feet wide and ten feet high.

Arlian was not pleased.

He had encountered no trace of magic, not so much as a bad dream, since his third day in the wastes; surety, there could be no need of defenses this far north! Nor could the gate be intended to defend against anything other than magic; what other threat could emerge from the lifeless desert?

Wasting time and money and manpower to build this thing was

foolish; the energy would have been better used in building catapults and carving obsidian spearheads—or in growing crops and raising children, since the Duke's truce with the dragons was presumably in effect.

The wagon rolled to a stop a few feet from the iron barrier, and Arlian tilted back his hat for a better view of the wall. The towers on either side of the gate were simple iron frames, but each was topped with a railed platform, accessible by a ladder on the north side—and neither platform was currently occupied.

"Ho, there!" Arlian called, as loudly as he could manage—his throat was rather dry, as they had been rolling since midday, and his shout was not all it might have been under better conditions.

The call echoed from the stone walls of the ravine, but no one answered. Arlian sat, glaring.

On the bench beside him, Poke leaned back into the interior, groping for something with his intact hand. The guardsman was in civilian garb; the Duke's livery had been stored away out of sight for months.

Double was in the wagon behind them; the driver's bench could acco-modate only two comfortably.

Poke found what he was after, and handed Arlian a half-full waterskin—their last; their supplies had been rationed carefully to get them across the Desolation, and if they did not get past this gate thirst might quickly become a real problem. Arlian took a healthy swig, cleared his throat, then stood up on the driver's bench and held his hands to either side of his mouth.

uHo, the gate!" ht bellowed.

His shout echoed from the iron and stone, but no one answered.

Double thrust his head out of the wagon's interior between Poke's shoulder and Arlian's hip, and for a moment all three men stared at the gate. Then Double pointed and said, "What's that, my lord?"

Arlian looked where Double's finger indicated, and saw a four-foot lever connected to a heavy chain that vanished into a small opening in the left-hand tower. He had not consciously noticed it before, thinking it merely a crooked bit of the tower's iron frame, but now that Double drew his attention to it, Arlian could see that it was a mechanism of some sort. He stepped down from the bench, jumped lightly to the ground, and strode over to the lever in question. Then he grabbed it in both hands, tested it, and heaved.

Machinery clanked, and the gates sagged open. The lever had

released a latch of some kind.

"By the dead gods," Arlian muttered, as he pushed one valve aside.

"What do they hope to keep out with that?" Clearly, whoever had built this gate and latch assumed that the magical creatures it was meant to exclude were mindless beasts; Arlian concluded therefore that the builders had never encountered wizards or gaunts.

A moment later the wagon was through the open gate, rolling down into Stonebreak. Double asked, "Shouldn't we close it again?"

Arlian growled. "No," he said. "If they're fool enough to leave it unmanned, it's not our responsibility to compensate for their folly."

"Maybe they left it unmanned because they're all dead," Poke suggested.

"Then there's no one to defend, and nothing to be accomplished by closing it," Arlian said—but his tone was milder; the possibility of some great catastrophe having taken place had not previously occurred to him. "I don't see that the gate served much purpose in any case—anything human could get through as we did, and a good many magical creatures are not bothered by iron, nor hindered by such simple barriers. If something has slain them all, then the gate did no good."

But then they rounded the final turn in the ravine, and the question was moot—they could see the village ahead, and people going about their business in the street. Everything looked much as Arlian remembered it—save that he could not see the catapults that had stood by the road. He supposed they had been moved to less obtrusive positions.

There had been no catapults in any of the towns beyond the Desolation, but he had expected them to be even more common and more obvious elsewhere than before his journey; he was mildly startled by their absence.

As they had on the way south, the three men stayed the night at the town's only inn, just a dozen yards from where Arlian had slain a soldier called Stonehand in a duel almost eighteen years before, and around the corner from the lot where he had bought the two now-dead horses.

Their arrival drew a great deal of attention from the townspeople; apparently caravans were scarce these days.

The locals had been somewhat irritated to learn that Arlian had left the iron gate open.

"The Duke's men said we should keep it closed," one man explained as Arlian ate his supper.

"And how are honest travelers to get through, then?"

"Just as you did," the innkeeper replied, as he delivered the last plate. "That's why we installed that lever."

"Except we had thought they would have the courtesy to leave it as they found it," the other man said.

"Perhaps if you left a man on watch . . . ?"

"That's what the Duke's messenger said we should do," a boy offered.

"But who's got the time to stand out there all day? We have better things to do. Bad enough we had to help the soldiers build it! I spent a good three weeks hauling and hammering iron, without earning a single ducat."

"It wasn't so bad," the innkeeper said.

"You weren't out there heaving iron bars about!"

"No, I had an inn full of soldiers and messengers and the like order-ing me about day and night, and not a one of them paid for his room. At least you weren't expected to do anything after sundown."

"And at least you were paid for the food and drink."

"What's the point of it?" Arlian asked.

The natives stopped their arguing to stare at him. "The point of what?" the innkeeper asked.

"The point of the gate."

"To keep out the bad magic," the boy said.

"But it's just iron," Arlian said. "That will stop some of the creatures of the earth and air, perhaps. What of silver for the creatures of darkness? Gems for the creatures of dreams and madness? And what of the creatures that can fly over it, or climb the ravine walls around it, or climb down the cliffs? What of humans in the thrall of magic, or wizards, who can work the lever as I did?"

The villagers glanced at one another.

"We wouldn't know anything of that," the innkeeper said.

"Are you a magician, then?" a plump woman asked.

"A dealer in magic, and a dabbler in sorcery," Arlian said. "Not a true magician."

"We have two sorcerers here in Stonebreak," one man said. "Neither of them said anything about the gate not being effective."

Arlian shrugged. "What would a sorcerer know of southern magic?

But I've just come from Arithei, and . . . well, that gate won't do much by itself."

"It doesn't have to," the innkeeper said. "I heard the Duke's men talking—they say the dragons will keep out the southern magic. Seems the Duke's made a pact with them, common cause against the southerners. The gate's just to slow 'em down until the dragons get here."

"You trust the dragons?" Arlian demanded.

No one answered at first, but as the silence grew uncomfortable one of the barmaids said, "We might as well; we can't do anything about them in any case."

Arlian frowned. "I had heard you had catapults here, with obsidian heads fitted to ten-foot bolts." In fact, he had signed the orders himself, though he had not personally overseen the installation, and he had taken a good approving look at them on his way south. "After what befell Cork T r e e . . . "

"The Duke took them back," the boy said. "The oxen that hauled the iron here hauled the catapults away."

"The boy's right," the innkeeper admitted.

Arlian did not like the sound of that at all. "Why?"

Feet shuffled and shoulders shrugged. "We don't know," a man admitted.

Arlian could think of a few possible reasons, none of which he liked.

"So you've traded the catapults for your iron gate. Have there been many incursions from the south, then? Strange births, transformed beasts, unnatural plants?"

"No."

"No, nothing like that."

"Nightmares, then, or strange dreams?"

"No."

"But the travelers have brought stories from the Borderlands!" the boy called. "Terrible stories!"

"The Borderlands are hundreds of miles from here, beyond the Desolation," Arlian pointed out.

"But the tales all agree the danger is moving north," a man pointed out. "Why leave our defenses until the last minute?"

"Ah, well, then if you're preparing for some possible danger years from now, the iron gate may be a good start," Arlian acknowledged.