Dragon's Treasure (30 page)

"More," he whispered. Molto gave him more water. Then he went away.

The sky was pulsating, and blue as he had never seen it before. Taran closed his eyes. He was in the shade: a blessing beyond price, after the heat of the wagon. He knew roughly where they were; north of Estancia, still in Ippa, and close, very close, to the Nakase border. Molto unhitched the mule and led the patient beast to a patch of grass. He bent to rummage in the wagon. Taran heard the sound of ax blows.

Then Molto returned to the shade, carrying a split of wood.

He slid his knife from its sheath and bent to his task. "My uncle was a wheelwright. Taught me how to mend a pin, fix an axle, bind a split wheel. Useful."

"Uh."

"A man needs a trade."

"Uh." He shifted. The grass beneath the tree was softer than the wagon planks. Birds twittered overhead. Taran looked up, into the canopy of leaves. The sunlight made his eyes hurt. He wondered how far from the road they were. Far enough so that if he were to yell, no one would hear him. He would yell anyway. He yelled. Molto swore, and jumped up, knife in hand.

He heard horses, coming fast.

Suddenly there were voices all about him, and horses, huge and dangerous. Molto was running. He saw the flash of sunlight on a spear. Molto screamed and went down. He felt the ropes about his chest and back fall away. The relief was enormous. Strong hands helped him to his feet. He recognized Finle, then Hawk the archer. Beside her stood a little boy. It was Shem Wolfson. What in the name of all the gods was Shem Wolfson doing in this place?

Karadur walked across the grass. Flames danced along his arms and through the wind-twisted gold of his hair. His eyes were white-hot. He looked supremely dangerous.

Taran croaked: "Herugin—I didn't kill him."

"Are you hurt?"

"No."

His gaze swept past Taran. "Bring him here." Rogys dragged Ralf Molto in front of him. Molto's face was tallow. Blood streamed down it from a cut on his scalp. His face was bruised. His right arm dangled by his side, clearly broken. Rogys thrust him to his knees. Dragon said, "Who sent you?"

Molto did not answer. Rogys jammed the butt of his spear into Molto's stomach. He folded, arm over his gut. Taran would have smiled, except that his mouth hurt too much.

"Who sent you," said the implacable deep voice.

Molto said, "Gilbert Nortero hired me. Marion diSorvino's man."

"What were your orders?"

"To get this man out of Atani Castle, and to deliver him to Sorvino in one piece. If I couldn't arrange to do that, I was simply to kill him."

"Did you kill my officer?"

Molto said, "No."

It was a lie. Taran opened his mouth to say it, and saw that he did not need to. Karadur hit Molto with his fist. The blow tore Molto out of Finle and Rogys's hands. He spun like a doll, and fell, face down, in the mud.

Finle prodded him with a foot. He did not move.

Karadur said, "Bring him to the Keep. I will deal with him later."

Then a great sheet of blue-white lightning fell out of the sky.

Taran closed his eyes. His hair stood on end. The lightning scorched the grass; he smelled the hot iron scent of it. He opened his eyes. He was nearly nose to nose with the golden dragon. Steam coiled from its nostrils. Its huge eyes, indifferent, pitiless, stared at him.

There was nothing remotely human in that gaze. He could not tell if it knew him or not. The fanged mouth opened in a terrible, bone-chilling roar.

Great wings unfurled. In one smooth bound, the golden dragon climbed into the sky, and shot south.

* * *

Touched by ordinary fire, fences burn, meadows strewn with dry grass burn, haystacks burn, wooden walls and buildings burn.

The fire that drips from the wings of a vengeful dragon is not ordinary fire. Beneath its withering caress, rivers boil to steam. Air heats until it cooks the lungs. Tools and cooking cauldrons and cages melt. Stone burns.

Inside the privacy of his big wooden house, where he was hosting a party, Marion diSorvino did not see what the citizens of his city saw as they went about their business on the streets: a great winged golden beast, arrow-shaped, arrow-swift. Fire shimmered on its wings. It traveled across the sky from north to south and fell blazing toward the city.

Seated with his companions at his lavishly appointed table, diSorvino heard a clamor in the hallway. Then the dining hall door crashed back upon its hinges, and a man entered.

Furious at the intrusion, diSorvino rose. He drew breath to shout for the guards.

Then he saw that it was Karadur Atani.

He sat down again, grinning, and reached for his wineglass. The northerner was angry, he could see that. But this was his house. "Care to join our party, my lord?" he said with elaborate courtesy. "Do come in. Teo, pour a glass of wine for our guest."

Teo did not move. Stupid boy.

"Come, my lord," he said again, "share a glass of wine with us." His guests looked from him to Atani apprehensively.

Gilberto Nortero, who was sitting at the other end of the table, near the doors, rose from his chair and started for the door. Atani turned his head and looked at him. He froze in midstep.

Atani said, "Who are you?"

"N-N-Nortero."

Idiot. He was stammering like a child. DiSorvino wanted to laugh. It was ludicrous to make so much out of what was really a private dispute. Atani had stolen something from him. He had retaliated. It was no great matter. He was sorry the plot had been discovered, but at least the bastard was dead. He hoped the death had been painful. His smiths had nearly finished forging the cage. He had been looking forward to locking the bastard into it, minus some significant portions of his anatomy, of course.

He raised his glass.

"A toast!" he said. "To justice!"

His guests slowly reached for their glasses.

Atani said, "The coward's way would have been wiser."

"What?" diSorvino said.

The room filled with light. Blinking from the dazzle, diSorvino at first could not understand what had happened, why the room had grown so hot. Suddenly the roof of his house was gone. Fire played about his feet. He glimpsed bright wings, claws the size of scimitars, and a barbed, coiling tail. He gasped, and fell, breathing flame. Huge lambent eyes stared down at him. There was nothing human in their depths.

He died then. About him the wooden walls of his mansion shriveled like straw. The wealthy, wellborn men who had been dining with the lord of the city crawled, choking, away from the ravaging fire. It followed them, chuckling. In the kitchens and laundry and stables, the maids and cooks and grooms screamed and scrambled to escape. It found them, too. Aster Minnasdatter, her unbound hair streaming fire, climbed from the window to the water barrel to the roof, and stood on the roof-pole, her youngest child in her arms. Outside the walls, between the burning mansion and the city cisterns, stood a line of men with buckets. Like all wooden cities, Sorvino had had its share of fires, and had created over time a cadre of experienced men who knew how to extinguish a fire, what would feed it, what restrain it. They knew their flimsy efforts could not exterminate this fire, but they hoped they might contain it. The man who led them—whose parents had named him, with uncommon prescience, Illuminato Moro—stood in front of Marion diSorvino's house with a bucket of warm water in his hands. "Fornicating dung-eating bastards..." He felt a prick of pain. He swore steadily and indiscriminately at the fire, at the stupid, terrified people who huddled in the road, and at his sandaled feet. Word of the savage blaze had brought him from his house too swiftly; he had neglected to put on his boots.

"Hoy!" called Ignacio, his second-in-command, and not incidentally, his brother. "Lumio! What d'you think? Should we—" He gestured toward the house.

"Absolutely not. No!" Lumio bawled back. Gods, his feet were on fire. "Stay where you are, you demon-begotten donkey!" Nacio always hoped that somewhere in the hottest blaze there might be a survivor. The heat from this fire was enormous. There would be no survivors. So fiery a blaze was unnatural. He could not imagine what had caused it.

Then the man in black walked out of the smoke. He was a very big man, very fair—and he was whole. The son of a bitch was whole. That was impossible. It was impossible that anyone should have walked unscathed out of such a conflagration.

Lumio started to shout at this madman, to tell him to hurry, to run, before the fire found him again. He was holding something. It squalled. A baby. Imarru's balls, he was holding a baby. He slung the screaming brat at Lumio. Lumio dropped the bucket just in time. He drew breath to swear at him.

Then he saw the inferno in the stranger's eyes, and saw the shape of the band coiled like a living thing around his bare forearm.

PART FOUR

16

Beyond the walls of Sorvino, in Alletti and Maranessa and Bruna, farmers and shepherds and herdsmen saw the grey cloud hanging above the city, and smelled the unmistakable odor of burning flesh. "Sorvino is burning," they said to one another.

High above the smoke and ash, the golden dragon made circles in the azure sky. "The dragon has burned Sorvino."

Those who remembered it—and some who did not, but pretended they did—reminded those who didn't of the madness of the Black Dragon and the burning of Mako, twenty years before.

On the day following the fire, Angel Angelino returned from Sorvino to his home in Bruna. An olive farmer, he had been in Sorvino visiting his daughter, who had married that good-for-nothing horse trader and left with him to live in the city.

"Sorvino stands," he told his family and a cluster of wide-eyed neighbors. "The walls are intact. DiSorvino is dead, though, and his house is gone. Nothing left of it but a pit in the ground."

His wife, Maria, shuddered. "May the Dark Lady be kind to him."

Lauda, her sister, said, "Marion diSorvino was a pig."

"Lauda!"

"He was. You all know it." Lauda put her hands on her hips. "But what will happen to
us
now? Who will guard the roads, and mend the bridges, and keep the merchants from cheating us of our profits?"

The folk of Bruna looked at one another. It was a serious question. A region without a ruler risked anarchy, lawlessness, and even bandits. They all remembered the outlaws who had raided them a year ago. They had paid money to get them to leave.

Maria said, "DiSorvino has a daughter.... Doesn't he have a daughter?"

Angelo frowned. "Aye. There's a boy, too."

"The boy wasn't his," Frisio said.

Lauda said, "I thought the girl wasn't either."

"Oh, aye, he said that. But I heard she was. And there's a brother in Kameni, a scholar of some sort...."

"I thought he was an astrologer," Angelo said. The folk of Bruna looked anxiously at one another. Astrologers were notoriously otherworldly, and some, it was said, were sorcerers. Not the sort of man one would choose to rule a city. It fell to Frisio, who had served as town constable and had even held officer's rank in the local militia, to reassure them.

"Don't worry. The Lemininkai will see to it. DiSorvino was his vassal."

Maria said, "The Lemininkai knows nothing of us; why should he care what becomes of us?"

Frisio said, "Because it's his business to care. You'll see. He's a good lord. They say his soldiers are honest."

Which, they all agreed, was more than could ever have been said of Marion diSorvino.

* * *

In Ujo, Kalni Leminin heard of the burning of Sorvino from Lorenzo Tullio, his intelligencer.

Tullio said, "DiSorvino is dead. So are twoscore of his friends and associates." He named them. The list included four of the town's six magistrates, all its senior military officers, the recorder, and its two bankers. "The house is gone. The city stands, though buildings nearest the Sorvino mansion took great damage."

"You're sure it was Atani who ignited the fire?" the Lemininkai asked.

"Yes. He was seen in dragon form, hovering above the house. And a fair-haired man, wearing black, with a gold band shaped like a dragon on his right forearm, walked out of the house as it was burning, and the flames did not touch him. I spoke to the chief of the bucket men, who saw him."

"I see," said the Lemininkai. "Thanks, Tullio." The intelligencer withdrew. The Lemininkai gazed out into the garden. The flower beds were bright with blossoms: roses of every description, red and pink and yellow, white lilies—his favorite—and purple irises. The trees were green and lush, just as they would have been in Sorvino.

"You were right," he said to Sarita. She sat in a chair beside the fountain. The jewel at her throat was worth the price of a house. "You said he was as dangerous as his father."