The Dragon Lord (21 page)

Aldric closed his eyes, feeling his heartbeat quicken and the breath begin to catch in his throat. Escape? An hour ago, yes, and willingly. But now? Now he could not.

The dragon blinked once and he heard the metallic click of its eyelids clearly in the silence. “Speak,” it repeated, more gently now.

“I cannot. I
must
not. I—” He looked up, deliberately seeking the dragon’s eyes. “I gave my Word.”

“The Word of one who by his own admission is without all honor?”

Aldric shrugged. “The right to keep a promise is all that I have left.”

“So, and so, and so. Thou art more worthy than the Maker ever was,
Kailin
Aldric-eir.”

To my eternal shame
. Again Aldric heard the voice inside his head, and again it was not Ymareth but Gemmel who seemed to speak.

“To his shame,” echoed the dragon.

Aldric listened, and heard, and at last a minute flower of understanding began to blossom in his mind. But it was a flower with somber petals, for the only meaning made possible by his understanding was such that his senses began to swim with the enormity of it all.

Ymareth’s wings unfurled, dwarfing the Imperial warship, and Aldric realized with a jolt that which he had unconsciously known since he came out onto the deck: now that he could see the firedrake against a background of normality rather than within the Cavern on Techaur, it was far, far bigger than he had dreamed. Wingtip to wingtip, Ymareth’s span was more than sixty yards; from nose to the flattened spade-shape which ended its tail— aerodynamic in section, like the horns and crest of its head—it was another forty yards in length. Weight… ? Enough to all but sink the bow of an armored battleram, more than enough to make flight impossible.

But then, everything to do with dragons seemed to be impossible: their speech, their intelligence, their flaming breath, their unnatural extra limbs—for surely it would be more right and proper for their wings to be like those of bats, an alteration of the forelegs—and above all the fact that at least one of these legend-bound creatures was alive and here before him, for all that logic said they could not exist in the natural scheme of things. Even though many men might desire dragons, the reality was overpowering. Inexorably the processes of Aldric’s thought sheared away surmise, reducing possibilities one by one until only the last remained. If dragons could not exist in a natural world, but one at least unquestionably did, then…

Who was the Maker?

And the answer to that was such that Aldric could not bear even to let it shape within his brain.

“I go.” Ymareth crouched low on tensed hindlegs, wings arcing up and up above the lean, scaled body until their uttermost tips met and crossed, then poised for the barest moment as the set of their membranes shifted to cup the air.

“Go?” Aldric asked the question hurriedly. “Go where?”

“From here. From this shell. They scarcely will forgive my flaming of their sails, for all that I bade them to stop ere harm befell. So. But the Eye will watch thee as it has watched aforetime. As I will watch thee, Dragon-lord. And I will know that which it is needful for me to know: Until that time, farewell!”

Ymareth’s hind-limbs straightened like the throwing-arms of a catapult, flinging the dragon’s armored bulk into a great bound towards the sky. An instant later and the wings swept down, their thunderous whack of displaced air ripping away what shreds of sail remained and all but blowing Aldric on to his back as they transformed that prodigious leap into true flight.

The battleram’s deck kicked beneath him as it plunged still lower in response to the dragon’s take-off thrust, then reared up past the horizontal as Ymareth’s weight was abruptly removed. Great concentric ripples rolled away from the ram bow as it smashed back into the sea in a cloud of spray and creamy foam, mingling with the rings of disturbed water where the pressure of the dragon’s wings had slapped brutally against the surface. And then all was still.

There was only a rakish black silhouette in the sky, and the feather touch of that cold breeze from the north. It was a stillness that was all too brief: Aldric had barely risen to his feet, legs weak with reaction and knees sore from the impact of the oak-plunked deck, before the two marines behind him shrugged off their firedrake-induced drowse and laid hard hands on his shoulders again. He glanced from side to side, looking at the troopers without really seeing them, and then relaxed in their grip without so much as a token twitch of either arm.

The warship’s captain glowered at him, all of his earlier frantic anger quite gone now and replaced by a deadly control. He reached out one armored steel-and-leather hand, twisted up the front of the Alban’s shirt and used it to lift Aldric onto tip-toe, almost eye-to-eye at last with the tall, lean
hautmarin
.

“It is as well for you,
hlens’l
,” he said quietly—too quietly—”that I have my orders. Otherwise I would take great pleasure in supervising your protracted death. Oh,[* *]but I would…” He said what he would do, in elaborate detail and at length.

Aldric stared at the officer, hanging in his grasp as limp and unconcerned as a kitten in its mother’s mouth; stared at him and through him as if he wasn’t there. Ignored him completely. He had heard all the threats before, more or less; some of them were original, indicative of a nasty mind, and some were commonplace. But all, because of those so-important orders, were just onion-scented air and the occasional passion-driven speck of spittle. Nothing more at all. In Aldric’s mind right now were two words and two words alone, words which had nothing to do with threats or Drusalan naval officers, or anything so mundane as that. They were words he understood in the literal sense, but did not dare to recognise as a title. Yet. Words that should have been repeated as a question:
Dragon Lord
?

But once the
hautmarin
had run out of breath and invention, he let himself smile slowly and deliberately full in the officer’s face. “Despite all that you say, shipmaster,” and he used the civilian rank as a clearly understood insult, “all that you can do is write in your report. Yes?”

The Drusalan smirked. “No. Not quite. Take him below.”

“That’s the house,” said Dewan. He didn’t stop, didn’t even slacken his pace, and most certainly did nothing so obvious as to point. But he sounded entirely certain and Gemmel was impressed.

Impressed not only with the results of his companion’s ability to extract information—from people who often had not known that they were answering a question— but also by the house itself. Gemmel had tried to avoid preconceived notions of what they might find, but once he had heard that the woman they sought was a courtesan, his mind had replaced the word with all of its uglier alternatives. It was both unusual and uncomfortable: he was normally a most tolerant man.

But once formed, those preconceived notions had led to further misconceptions, errors that were now shattered like glass. None of the
sluts
, or
harlots
, or
whores
of his imaginings would or could live in such a dwelling; at least, if they were still to justify such names as his ungenerous subconscious had supplied. He altered the angle of his stride a fraction, intending to walk straight in—since surely gentlemen callers were familiar at this front door—but without apparent deliberate intent, Dewan was suddenly in the way.

“Not so hasty!” The Vreijek’s voice was crisp and commanding, as it had been since first they passed through the Landwall Gate; Dewan could have donned the uniform and half-harness in his laden pack at any time, and not have drawn a second glance by incorrect demeanor. “Take this carefully, man. Remember the battleram. Somebody was here before us—if we’re guessing right—and I want to make sure they’re gone before we go barging in. So gently does it, eh?”

They walked on, idly curious about their surroundings and no more until Gemmel felt—
sensed
Dewan go tense. “In the stable entry. Don’t
look
! One man. Minding his own business. Too much so, I think.” There was the faintest whisker of hesitation in Dewan’s stride, and Gemmel knew that violence and sudden death were being considered in that instant.

Then the Vreijek relaxed. He even chuckled—a deep, rich sound unusual right now for its incongruity. Now at last Gemmel chanced an over-shoulder glance at the source of such conflicting reactions—and stifled a laugh in his turn. “Ah,” was all that he said at first, for all that there was a paragraph of meaning in his tone. Then: “He was minding his own business after all.”

“His, and nobody else’s.”

The man Dewan ar Korentin had seen—and might have killed, had he not chanced that swift second glance— walked past them with no more than a nod and a muttered word of inconsequential greeting. He smelt somewhat of beer and he was busy fastening his breeches.

Gemmel watched him until he passed out of sight around a corner, leaving the street empty but for himself and Dewan. Then he turned a little, and his smile was gone as though it had never existed. “Now—do we stay here, or do we get this matter done with and out of the way?”

“I told you before, don’t worry about it. You still talk as if I’m going to put someone’s feet in the fire. I’m not.”

“Unless you have to. And then you will.”

“Not if I can get the information any other way, old wizard, old friend. I served with the Bodyguard Cavalry, not with the Secret Police. But I can still talk a good threat when I have to.”

Kathur’s head jerked up from the travelling-trunk she had been so frantically packing and turned towards the door of her room, a door that once again framed the backlit outlines of intruders. Her eyes flickered from one man to the other, back and forth, and the garment in her hands slithered from its folds to hang in an untidy limp tangle like a wet flag. There was a hunted, persecuted look on her face, and it deepened to something near terror when one of the men took the single step necessary to bring him across the threshold; he was broad-shouldered, mustached, the younger of the two and the bigger in all but height, and he looked by far the more likely to hurt her.

Hurting had been very much at the forefront of the Drusalan woman’s mind these past few hours. Hurting— and confusion, and misery, and regret, and all those other emotions that early yesterday she would have sworn that she was done with feeling. But now all of those lesser emotions were subordinated by an all-consuming fear.

To his credit, Dewan ar Korentin read her face and her eyes and stopped what he knew must be a threatening advance at once. “Gemmel,” he said, using Alban, “best I think that you talk to her and I keep out of it. For now, anyway.”

Gemmel shot him a quizzical, eyebrow-lifted glance, but followed the request immediately; he too had seen how terrified the woman was, and from the first glance had been appalled at how she differed from the description Dewan had cajoled from one of the local people. He was more appalled still by the all-too-plain reasons for that difference.

Only the fox-red hair remained unchanged; for the rest, although there was still an eroded beauty in her face and figure, it was masked by her expression and by the purpled tissue of a carefully-administered brutalising. Gemmel’s mind refused to accept the lesser alternative of
beating
, because although what he could see was bad enough, the flinching, careful way in which she moved implied that worse was hidden by her clothing. Maliciously, sadistically, much, much worse. And to his own private shame both then and afterwards, the first words which left his mouth were an unjust accusation that he could only blame on shock and the cynicism of one who has seen too much cruelty to too many people to believe that even the most familiar might be incapable of it.

“Lady—did Aldric Talvalin do this to you?”

• • • *
      

The battleram limped towards harbor; as she had limped heavily, leadenly, since her fiery encounter with Ymareth. Aldric, on deck and under guard, was limping too, Important prisoner or not, gentleman or not—both matters stridently if uselessly protested—he had perforce assisted the warship’s crew to bring their vessel safely into port.

He had not known that the witch-wind enchantment was woven into the pattern and the fabric of the sails. He had not known that destruction of those sails meant destruction of the spell, and consequently of the battle-ram’s ability to move at speed wherever her captain desired regardless of the vagaries of wind and weather. And he had not known—although he had suspected— that without the charmed sails at her mast and bowsprit, an Imperial capital ship became lumbering, ungainly and above all slow.

He knew it now, and the information had been docketed at the back of his mind for possible future reference.

Just as he also knew now—for it was engraved in every muscle of his body that hurt individually and collectively in a symphony of discomfort that would flare to real pain as they cooled and stiffened—how such a vessel must be propelled when the wind was in the wrong quarter for ordinary sails. By such aching muscles as his own.

Not muscles pulling oars, which he might have understood at once had not the lack of oarlocks along the battleram’s armored sides denied any such notion. The ship’s design was not that of a galley; and in any case her half-dozen close-maneuvering sweeps were too few in number for lengthy propulsion on the high seas. Instead there was some arrangement of shafts and cranks deep in her belly, enhanced by gears and cogs and wheels such as were so beloved by the Drusalans, which ultimately spun a seven-bladed thrust-screw at the vessel’s stem. That much the captain had told him with a degree of relish as he was escorted below-decks to the drive chamber which ran almost the full length of the warship’s keel and—he alone—shackled by neck and waist to ringbolts in the hull cross-members.

He had at first been advised, not ordered, to strip; and at first he had refused, thinking that it was just another attempt to humiliate him. And had continued to refuse until he saw the conditions in which he would be work-ing. Then he had undressed quickly enough, down to the brief trunks which were the last step before nudity. He kept those. Albans were a modest folk, except in those situations where modesty was an affectation and which situations usually involved women—but he had been grateful that nothing warmer than the too-hot air was pressing on his skin.