The Dragon Lord (42 page)

And Aldric stood up; uncertainly, unsteadily, because the floor still quivered beneath the soles of his boots, and because the blast of noise which had been Ymareth’s irritation had stunned and almost bled his inner ears so that his balance was none of the best. But he stood, crimson and black in the Imperial Grand Warlord’s livery which he had come to hate, with the blue-white fire of the Echainon stone crawling along his arm like some eerie embroidery set into the red-enamelled metal. Yet it was the human weapon, the
telek
, that he extended towards where his enemy must be; a
telek
cocked and ready, loaded with clean steel that was shod with lead for penetration’s sake. And at the very back of his mind Aldric wished that he had loaded with pure silver.

“Voord? Voord, you traitor, you mocker of honor, come out!” It was stilted, formal, unreal—but it worked, for Voord emerged from the shadows and stood quite still with both hands by his sides. The other
telek
was still gripped in one of them, but it pointed at the floor and was harmless; Aldric’s own ready-levelled weapon could shoot unerringly true before Voord’s could rise through enough of an arc to make it threatening. “You failed, Voord—your own worst crime, I’ve been told. So… why Bruda, then?”

“How little you understand, Alban, He’s dead. So I’m promoted.”

“Why? You killed him.”

“Quite. I live—he doesn’t. Promotion.”

Aldric stared at him, lit by the fires of burning wood and leashed-in power. The words wouldn’t take shape in his mouth, wouldn’t take their places on his tongue or in his throat. Not in Drusalan, anyway. It was a foul language at the best of times. Alban was better by far and much more appropriate for the formal, age-old declaration. “Then I bring you your most necessary death.”

He squeezed the
telek’s
trigger and with a noise like a chisel into grained timber, a dart sprouted just above Voord’s right eye. Just clear of the helmet’s nasal and just below its peak. At that range—fifteen feet, maybe less—the Vlechan’s head was snapped back; right back, so that his skull struck between his own shoulderblades. Even without the dart, that jolt would have broken his neck. The ridge of his helmet-crest grated against the wall behind him…

Then grated again as he drew himself straight once more and with a heave which needed both hands on its stubby shaft, wrenched the dart out of his head.

The frontal skull-bone might not have knitted straight away, but with his own eyes Aldric saw the bloodflow stop and the torn flesh run together like wax smoothed with a hot iron.
Like cu Ruruc
!

“You see,
hlensyarl
?” There was a vile phlegmy thickness in Voord’s voice when he spoke now. “You see? You can’t hurt me. I’m deathless! Marevna, can you hear me? I’m undying—and I’ll come for you again. Enjoy sweet dreams till then, my lady!” He twisted out of the doorway and was gone—and still the power of the spellstone whorled around Aldric’s arm, contained, unused. Useless now.

“Does use of this touch over-closely on thy honor, man?” Ymareth’s voice was cold, sarcastic, disapproving. “Then hear me this last time and believe, for I shall never speak it more. Honor is mine to judge and thou art not yet wanting; but these ladies are now thine to guard and to keep in safety. How wilt thou, when thou knowest not the place wherein thy foe now hides?”

“Get out of my head!” Aldric wrenched at the straps of the Imperial helmet and pulled it free. He stared at the golden insignia, inverted triangle over diamond over double bars, none of it rightfully his—all of it a lie, all lies lies lies—and flung the helmet away from him in a clatter of metal and leather. It bounced from half-a-dozen things, broken furniture and smouldering logs and sideslipped heaps of crumbling stone, then rolled and came to rest and see-sawed to and fro a moment on the brightmetal comb of its cavalry cresting. Afterwards was very quiet in the room. As quiet as the grave.
Was all this useless
? Aldric thought, fearing for the worst. All the sneaking and the lying and the killing, all wasted by a stray dart of a fallen piece of masonry “My lady?” He no longer troubled to hide that Elthanek accent of his. “My lady, answer—if you can.”

“I can,” said Marevna an-Sherban and coughed. She lifted her head and upper body on braced hands and fragments of what had once been a comfortable, pretty room tumbled from her back. “Neither of us is hurt. Much. Thanks to you!”

When both women were on their feet, Aldric was better able to see the extent of that “much.” There was a ragged hole through Chirel’s upper arm; from the state of her sleeve it had bled heavily until staunched by a torn-off strip of material, and in its triangular
telek-dart
shape it exactly matched the shallow puncture on Princess Marevna’s face. Had Chirel’s far-from-feminine bicep not been around Marevna’s head, cuddling it as she must have done when the princess was a frightened child—or had she been one of those willowy ladies rather than the muscular, capable person she was, then… The
then
was obvious.

For the rest there were scratches, bruises, blisters from the sparks and embers flung out of the fire; but nothing worse. Aldric sucked in a deep breath, heedless of the plaster-dust and smoke suspended in it, and felt reborn even as he bent double in an eye-streaming coughing fit. He had known it all along, and had refused to even think about: the possibility that something might go wrong. For if Marevna had come to lasting harm, then everything—all the fear, and the pain, and the lies, and the death—would have been for nothing. Wasted.

“It feels like an hour ago that I last said this, lady, ladies—but I
am
here to rescue you. Dress warmly and follow quickly, please!” Events of the past few minutes had convinced even Chirel far more than his most plausible speech could ever have done, and neither took very long over wrapping themselves in furred garments which were the first sign of real riches Aldric had so far seen. He handed them courteously across the threshold of the room, no longer quite a threshold or even a definite boundary between outside and in; but more particularly, he placed himself and his supporting hand between their eyes and Bruda, for though dying fast the Prokrator was not yet dead. Not quite. He was hanging on to life not to save himself but to do, or say, or pass on something of very great importance. So great that he had held himself away from oblivion for a time which must have seemed far longer than all the years of his life.

His fingers were bleeding, their cracked and broken nails flexing convulsively in and out of his shredded palms as if that little pain could distract fast-ebbing life from its departure through the inch-long rip beneath his ear which had nicked both jugular and carotid, opening them to the pungent air. But not enough for quick re-lease. He still lived—each minute, second, breath marked by the crisp spurt of blood against the floor.

“Talvalin,” he gasped as Alaric stepped over him, and in his voice was the sudden fear that this
hlensyarl
with no reason to love either the Drusalan Empire or its’ Secret Police would walk on, walk away and leave him alone to listen to his last drop of blood as it dribbled out into the Red Tower’s dust. But Aldric was already dropping to one knee, heedless of or disregarding the moist dark warmth which soaked through his breeches.

“
Tlei-ai, Bruda’ka; mn’aü ch’aschh
.”

“Lie easy, friend, here I am.” It was the form of Drusalan which lay easiest on an Alban tongue; amiable and warm, without the strata of rank and separation he always had cause to use before. There was neither time nor place for that now. Not here. A dying Chief of Secret Police on his back in the dust was a dying man first and last. Nationality didn’t matter; if there was a way of recognising accent in a wordless sound of agony, Aldric had no wish to learn it.

“... should have trusted you,” Bruda mumbled. “First. Foremost. Last. Honor, you see.” The man’s hands were already cold as they reached out, and sticky with blood. Aldric caught them; let himself be caught. Like marble: no feeling, no pulse, no color. Nothing. “... both betrayed. Me. You. Trust ice in summer first. Voord wanted, wants…
has
my place now. My rank. My power…”

Bruda was surely rambling, passing into delirium as shadows gathered about him, talking only because the sound of speech was the sound of living and hearing his own voice was proof that he was not yet lost. But for all that there was an uncomfortable reality behind the slurring, broken sentences. Too much so. “You were given to us. For fear—no, in case they got to you first. And I sent Voord!” He laughed, a horrible bubbling sound which brought red froth welling from the corners of his mouth. “But it wasn’t right. Wasn’t decent. Your king… to give an honorable vassal like a slave. Not right to betray…”

Bruda’s cold hand tightened on Aldric’s warm fingers, closing so convulsively that in another circumstance the Alban might have sworn and wrenched away. But not now. Never now. The Prokrator’s head and shoulders lifted from the planks which pillowed them, and that strain sent a long spray of darkness splattering across the floor. It seemed wrong that the blood of so educated, so intelligent, so politically aware a man should soak into the hungry dust like an unthinking wave on a beach. “All the honor is yours alone. She is safe. Free. Living.” Bruda’s eyes opened very wide, blue and ingenuous as the eyes of a child; deceptive to the last. “Go to Dur-foren, Al’Dirac-
an
. To the monastery. They were expecting us. Hah! You and Marevna should get quite a welcome. Bid Ioen the Emperor live for ever. From me. Who cannot live… a… moment mor—”

Aldric knew the slack weight of death, cradled in his two hands. He laid Bruda’s head back to the floor, very gently, for whatever the man had done and planned to do, he had still died well and it was not for Aldric Talvalin to treat his corpse with disrespect. He closed the fixed and staring eyes and respectfully arranged Bruda’s hands crosswise on his chest so that—if tradition spoke truly—he would go with dignity into the Void. Did Drusalans believe in Void, and Circle, and the hope to go from sure melancholy to rebirth and the chance of gladness? He didn’t know the answer. But just in case, he did all that was proper by his own beliefs, as he had done once before to a corpse pulped out of recognition. Because fire was clean…

Urgency was set aside just for this brief moment, as a respect for that which was an Ending in every faith. Aldric crossed his hands—palms outwards and the stone of Echainon, the Eye of the Dragon, outermost of all. Its fires still rolled upwards, over and around and through his fingers, cool, warm, barely and yet always present. “
Alh’noen ecchaur i aiyya
,” he said, and let those fires wash from the crystal, across all that remained of Bruda, Prokrator,
hauthanalth
, man.

Then he rose, and turned from the low mound of dry gray ash, and walked away.

“Diversion, the man said!” crowed Dewan delightedly, all but clapping his hands. “If that’s a diversion, then I wouldn’t want to be in the same city as a real attack! Mercy of Heaven, will you just look at that!”

Ymareth was skyborne once more, circling the Red Tower in a tight, steep constant bank, black and gigantic against the falling snow and the firelit crimson of the Tower. Flame plumed constantly from its jaws in great hot billows that blasted the snow to steam. Around the Red Tower, it was raining.

All of Egisburg must be awake now, thought Dewan; no matter how sodden they might be, nobody could sleep through
this
! That first roar was fit to wake the dead, never mind the drunken; he had heard windows shattering all across Tower Square after that brief flicker of blue light from one very particular window a quarter up the Tower’s grim height. It was then that Ymareth had roared, and launched with heavy grace into a dive from the ramparts which had become full flight within a hundred feet. He had seen that as the wavering curtain of snow had thinned for just a moment, and then as the fires began he could see even despite the storm’s renewed fury. Still the dragon circled, flaming, and yet, through all the flames and the roaring, Dewan couldn’t put aside the thought that Ymareth was laughing.

There were no soldiers to be seen. Oh, there had been plenty and enough to spare a few minutes past, when they had poured from the Red Tower’s doorway like ants from a kicked nest, but they had kept on running—through the slush and the deluge of dragon-melted sleet, out of the perimeter gates, into the white whirl of the blizzard and out of Dewan’s concern. He had seen soldiers run like that before, twice; they wouldn’t be back tonight. Except for Aldric and Princess Marevna, the Tower was surely empty now.

Gemmel was plainly thinking the same thing. He scraped snow from his beard and brows, knowing the gesture to be a useless one, and hefted the no-longer needed Dragonwand. “Move in,” he said.

Directly they stepped forward, the hoofbeats came up behind them both. Several horses, at the trot. Dewan drew blade and swung around, dropping to a fighting crouch—and then relaxed, his moment made perfect by Gemmel’s splutter of astonishment as the wizard saw Tehal Kyrin approaching them through the snow. She was leading six horses at a sort of jog-trot: Aldric’s black Lyard and his packpony, her own gray gelding K’schei and three more riding-horses with empty saddles.

“Expecting someone, my dear?” purred Dewan as he bowed low.

“I keep telling you not to call me that,” said Kyrin, but her feigned exasperation was half-hearted and lacked spirit; all her concentration was elsewhere, on what was happening around the Red Tower, and Gemmel had to address her twice before she heard him.

“Lady? Lady! Are you also a part of this—or are you acting independently?”

“I… You’d be Gemmel. Yes. Who else?” She was still uncertain of how one spoke to sorcerers—cautiously, of course, that went without saying—and twitched him a little bow whose effect was rather lost when K’schei threw up his head and yanked her not only upright but momentarily off tip-toe. “Tehal Kyrin,” she introduced herself when she had a little breath back. “And no: I’m not concerned with politics—Alba’s, the Empire’s or yours. Sir,” she added, thinking it prudent.