Dragon Venom (Obsidian Chronicles Book 3) (32 page)

"You'll need to do more in time, though."

"Of course," the innkeeper said. "Of course! And we'll do it when the time comes."

"As soon as the Duke sends us orders."

Arlian nodded, and said no more, but his thoughts were not quiet.

There were several things that troubled him about this situation.

Firstly, building iron gates so far from the town, and only on the southern side, was useless; if the dragons died and the magic came it would come from all directions, from earth and sky, and a full wall encircling the town would be needed to keep out the worst of it.

And if the dragons did not die, then the magic would not come.

These people had no way of knowing that, but the Duke's advisors ought to. The Duke himself, although he had gained some sense over the past several years, was still a bit of a fool, and he might not recognize the situation, but surely, some of the people around him would have explained it to him!

If the Duke was trying to build defenses against magical invasion from the south, who was advising him? Why would anyone suggest such a course? All this did was to waste time and money that could be better spent elsewhere; what would anyone stand to gain from that?

And why were Stonebreak's defenses against the still-real danger of the dragons gutted? Where were those catapults taken? What had become of the obsidian points? Were the dragons' servants in control, and removing anything that might threaten their monstrous masters?

What was happening in Manfort? Was the city, too, being stripped of its defenses? Could even the Duke be that foolish?

And for that matter, why were the people of Stonebreak speaking of the Duke as if he were their lord and master? True, there was no higher authority in the Lands of Man than the Duke of Manfort, and every trading village was expected to pay taxes to the Duke, but that was largely a relic of ancient times. The Duke's ancestors had been the warlords who commanded the human armies in the Man-Dragon Wars, and for seven centuries the Dukes and their troops had been charged with keeping the peace and defending the land against all foes, but they had never been recognized as the final authority in other matters. Local lords and village councils had always set their own rules and made their own decisions—but the people of Stonebreak had built that ridiculous gate at the Duke's command, and allowed their catapults to be hauled away.

Arlian could only guess that they were acting out of fear. In recent years, ever since Lord Enziet's death, the peace had been not merely broken, but utterly shattered—towns and villages had been destroyed by dragons, the lords of the Dragon Society had warred openly against the Duke, and now stories of wild magic rampaging through the Borderlands were everywhere. A village could not hope to defend itself unaided—and the Duke was the only one offering aid. The villagers did not know how to protect themselves against these menaces, and the Duke, it would seem, claimed that he did know. What could be more natural than that they would hurry to obey their traditional protector?

Why would they question his knowledge?

Arlian finished his chop, scraping the last meat from the bone with his knife, then looked around.

"I thank you all for acquainting me with circumstances here, and I regret any inconvenience I may have caused by leaving the gate open, but I assure you, there is no magic threatening you at present that the gate would keep out. The wild magic has indeed spread into the Borderlands, but is still well south of the Desolation, and does not seem to be encroaching further."

Unless more dragons died, he did not expect it to ever advance, but he saw no point in saying this.

"Is it really bad in the Borderlands?" the boy asked. "Are there really bloodsucking monsters everywhere, draining the life from the cattle?"

"Not everywhere," Arlian assured him, and that casual response unleashed a flood of questions. He spent the rest of the evening describing what he had and had not seen in the south.

And in the morning he and his men headed out while the sun was still red in the east; Arlian wanted to reach Manfort as soon as possible, to see for himself what the Duke was up to.

28

Manfort Transformed

Manfort Transformed

The ruins of Cork Tree were as depressing as ever; no one had yet made any attempt to rebuild, and the trees growing up from empty foundations were taller and sturdier than before.

In Sadar there were no iron gates, but iron posts, not unlike the road markers used in Arithei, encircled the village. The obsidian-throwing catapults that had been built and armed some ten years before were gone; the locals explained that the Duke's men had said they were needed more urgently elsewhere.

In Blasted Oak a protective iron framework had been built around the central shrine, and the catapults were gone.

Jumpwater had no added protections, but the catapults were gone; the same was true at Benth-in-Tara. Arlian found himself wondering what the Duke did with all that obsidian.

And then, when he at long last came within sight of Manfort's walls, he saw.

They were rolling through the surrounding towns—Manfort had

outgrown its walls long ago, though the streets and shops and houses clustered outside the ramparts were not considered truly part of the city—when they rounded a corner and caught their first good view of the ancient defenses.

At first Arlian thought either his eyes or his memories were deceiv-ing him; the walls seemed higher than he remembered, more shadowed, and they glittered in the late-afternoon sun in a way he had never noticed before.

But then he looked more closely, and understood.

The walls were higher. The blacknesses were not shadows, and the glittering was sunlight refracted by black volcanic glass.

Great obsidian spikes had been set into the battlements, hundreds of them; the black iron frameworks of dozens of catapults rose above the spikes, and thousands of wooden shafts tipped with still more obsidian bristled from the catapults.

The Duke might have made a bargain with the dragons, but that did not mean he trusted them; he clearly intended to assure that whatever else might happen, Manfort itself would never fall to the beasts.

"Idiot," Arlian muttered to himself. "What does he plan to eat if he lets the dragons destroy everything else?"

"What?" Poke asked, jerking upright. He had been drowsing, half-asleep, on the bench at Arlian's side.

"Nothing," Arlian said. "But look, we're almost home." He pointed.

Poke looked, then blinked.

"What did they do to it?" he asked.

Arlian laughed. "Added to the defenses," he said.

Poke did not reply, but stared open-mouthed.

By the time they rolled through the gates Arlian was staring somewhat himself. The Duke must have set his entire army to the task within days of Arlian's departure; the city's defenses were truly astonishing.

Arlian had not realized there was so much obsidian in all the world; the deposits on the Smoking Mountain must have been stripped clean.

The Duke of Manfort obviously took the possibility of a dragon attack very seriously indeed, despite the truce. Arlian wondered why.

The dragons had not dared to attack Manfort itself in more than seven hundred years; why would His Grace feel the need for such elaborate defenses?

Once through the gates the streets of Manfort were much as Arlian remembered them, paved in stone and bustling with humanity—but the crowds seemed even thicker, and there were new shadows on them. The sounds of hammering and men shouting echoed from the stone walls.

Arlian's gaze rose to the rooftops.

More catapults. More obsidian—though Arlian noticed that the

spearheads on the shafts here were smaller, more delicate, and some appeared to be steel heads with mere chips of obsidian set into them; dearly, supplies of the black stone were running low. Some shafts, in fact, had no heads at all yet. And workmen were still installing more frameworks, more counterweights, more spearshafts, as if the intent was to place at least a dozen shafts atop every building in the city.

Arlian had intended to request an audience with the Duke in any case, but he had not felt any great urgency about it; now he did.

First, though, he needed to stop at the Grey House, to clean himself up and hear the news. He had been gone for two years, more or less, and obviously things had happened in his absence, the city going on about its business without him.

He hoped that Black, Brook, and the children were all well—and that Lady Rime had not passed away. She had seemed healthy enough when he left, but she was not a young woman.

Arlian snorted slightly at that thought; Lady Rime was more than four hundred years old. "Not a young woman" hardly began to describe it! Most of those years had passed while she was contaminated with dragonspawn, and left her untouched; Arlian could not hope to judge accurately her natural age.

The streets were thronged; whatever else might have taken place, the city's population had clearly not decreased. Their progress was slowed by the crowds of pedestrians.

At last, late in the afternoon, the wagon rolled up to the gate of the Grey House. Arlian leapt from the bench, leaving Poke and Double to unload and to attend to the oxen.

He had scarcely handed his hat and cloak to the footman in the foyer when Black appeared. He wore his customary black leather, but incongruously, he held a baby in his arms, a bright-eyed child perhaps a year old, swaddled in fine linen. Black was smiling broadly, beard bris-ding, and the infant was staring up at him in wide-eyed wonder.

"Ari," he said. "Welcome back."

"Thank you," Arlian replied. "It's good to see you." He glanced at the baby. "Who is this?"

"My son," Black said proudly, displaying the gaping, gurgling child.

"Dirinan"

"I see I have missed a great deal."

"Come and join us, and we'll discuss it."

Several minutes later Arlian, Black, and Brook were seated in the gallery, with Dirinan safely in his mother's arms after having demonstrated his eagerness to walk half a dozen wobbly steps before falling, and his ability to make noises that could generously be interpreted as words; these remarkable accomplishments had been appropriately admired by the master of the house. A footman set a tray of wine and cakes on the table before vanishing, leaving the four alone.

Arlian was eager to hear the news, but the others, just as eager to hear an account of his journey, outvoted him, and he spent the next hour giving an account of his explorations beyond the Desolation—

though he provided very little detail regarding what he had learned of the nature of magic, emphasizing instead the strange lands and fearsome creatures he had encountered. He did not care to say much about his own plans—or even make those plans—until he knew more about the situation in Manfort.

Finally, though, after he had spoken enough to satisfy his listeners temporarily, Black provided a quick summary of how matters had progressed in his absence.

The discovery that killing dragons allowed wild magic to encroach upon the Lands of Man had not merely forced the Duke to negotiate with the Dragon Society; it had shaken the very foundations of his beliefs. He had inherited his title in a time of peace and plenty, when the dragons were rarely seen and no other great dangers threatened his realm. When Enziet's death and Arlian's actions had spurred the dragons to greater activity he had seen it as a temporary problem; Arlian's killing of the dragon that destroyed the Old Palace had brought His Grace to believe that this ancient evil could finally be obliterated, restoring the peace and inaugurating an even greater age of plenty.

The knowledge that destroying the dragons would instead plunge the land into chaos had convinced the Duke that the entire world outside Manfort was, by its very nature, inimical to humanity. He now looked back on those peaceful days before Enziet's death as a lost golden age, a historical fluke, one that was gone forever; he had said as much on many occasions, making no secret of his beliefs.

The dragons, through their human puppets in the Dragon Society, had made demands, and the Duke, rather than struggle against the inevitable, had yielded to most of them. The dragons had agreed to reduce their attacks if no more towns and villages were armed with obsidian weapons, and the Duke had done them one better, withdrawing all the existing defenses outside Manfort itself, in exchange, the dragons had promised that no more than one village would be destroyed each year.

The dragons had wanted the defenses destroyed entirely, but the Duke had balked at that. He had resolved that there must be at least one place kept free of the dragons, one place where men could live without fear of the supernatural evils that dominated the rest of the world, and he intended to insure that Manfort would be such a place.

Word of this had apparently spread; the crowded streets Arlian had noticed were the result of an influx of dragon-wary people who had decided to take refuge within the re-fortified walls.

"I'm impressed," Arlian remarked. "I had not thought His Grace had the will to carry out such a scheme in the face of the Dragon Society's objections."

"The Duke has the unyielding support of his advisors," Black replied. "It was Lord Zaner who proposed making Manfort an impene-trable fortress, and who has overseen the elaboration of the city's defenses. As your representative, I gave him my full cooperation in providing obsidian from the Smoking Mountain; I trust this pleases you."

"Lord Zaner?"

"He is now chief advisor to His Grace," Brook said. She had one finger in Dirinan's mouth, and he had fallen asleep sucking gently on it; Brook had seemed to focus her attention on the baby throughout much of the conversation, but clearly she had been listening, and now she looked up at Arlian as she spoke.

Arlian blinked, but swallowed further comment.

He had wondered for an instant whether Lord Zaner might be part of some elaborate plot to undermine the Duke's position—after all, Zaner had sided with the dragons for fourteen years. But then he remembered that Zaner had given up centuries of life, had had himself cleansed of his draconic taint. That could not be a ruse; the dragons would never have allowed one of their offspring to be destroyed as part of a political ploy. No, Zaner could unquestionably be trusted, and his vigorous defense of Manfort was probably the zeal of the convert in action.