The Veiled Dragon (32 page)

she had stepped earlier. She tried to kick free, but it felt no pain from her blows and would not let go. Hsieh appeared at Ruha’s side and brought his sword down across the corpse’s shoulders. The dark blade passed over the zombie’s body like a shadow, causing no harm at all. The mandarin’s narrow eyes grew as round as saucers; then the arms of a dead cultist grabbed him from behind and hurled him to the ground. The cobblestones shuddered as Cypress resumed walking. Ruha craned her neck and saw that she and Hsieh were not the only ones in dire circumstances. The dragon had animated all the corpses in the street. Though the zombies were slow and clumsy, they were pressing the Shou survivors by virtue of their numbers alone. Ruha’s attacker grabbed hold other belt, then slammed its free fist into the pit other stomach. She tried to scream in pain, but the blow had driven her breath away, and she could do no more than grunt. The zombie raised its fist to strike again. She released the oil sack and deflected the punch with her forearm. In the same motion, the witch drove the heel other free hand into the side of her attacker’s head and heard the temple snap. ^Pushing with all the strength in her legs, she rolled onto “-her side and threw the dead Shou off. •^Ruha grabbed the oil sack and leapt up. As she turned to flee, the dragon’s huge shadow fell over her body. She sprinted for the intersection. The pain in her side was excruciating, but she managed to ignore it and rush forward at a pace that would have made a hare-hound proud. She kept expecting Cypress to say something, to iwcommand her to stop or at least to taunt her, but he held his tongue. Ruha found the silence even more alarming than the hiss of his lungs filling to spray acid. The dragon was thinking of only one thing: killing her. To comment on his intentions would have been a meaningless waste of breath. The street trembled again, and Ruha knew she had no hope of outrunning her pursuer. She summoned a wind

spell to mind and darted toward the street side, then heard the whoosh of the dragon’s huge talons slicing through the air behind her. The witch forced herself not to look toward her pursuer’s face; the last time she met his gaze, he had nearly taken over her mind. Ruha angled toward the entrance to the nearest tenement. In the corner other eye, she glimpsed Cypress’s other huge claw sweeping down to pluck her up. She slammed her feet against the street and managed to slow herself, allowing the black hand to sweep past without catching her. Then, feeling like a spiny iguana dodging a hungry Bedine boy, she darted forward again. The tenement was barely three paces away. Ruha took a deep breath, then uttered her wind spell and exhaled. A ferocious gust of air howled from her lips, blasting the heavy oaken door into splinters. The witch rushed blindly into the building’s deep-shadowed interior. Three paces inside, she stumbled over a step and slammed face first into a wooden staircase. Ruha gathered herself together and spun around, then barely leapt aside in time to prevent Hsieh’s dark sword from piercing her heart. The mandarin stumbled over the same stair as the witch, but managed to recover more gracefully by picking up his feet and landing two steps up the stairwell. Behind him came two of his men, who also displayed their incredible agility by managing to catch each other when they also tripped over the step. The witch did not know how any of them had escaped the zombies—in a manner similar to how she had, she supposed—but she was glad for the company. “Where now?” Hsieh squinted at Ruha with his uncovered eye. “I do not know.” Ruha stepped around the stairwell and ran down a broad, dirty corridor toward the back of the building. As Hsieh and his men moved to follow. Cypress’s hand burst through the doorway and caught the last one in line. The warrior howled in pain, and Hsieh raised his sword to

charge the doorway. Ruha caught him by the shoulder. “If that blade did not affect the corpses, it will not harm Cypress. He is also undead.” “Thank you. I would feel most foolish.” The mandarin gestured down the corridor. “Please to make most of soldier’s sacrifice.” Ruha turned down the hall and tried a dozen barred doors before the captured man finally stopped screaming. There was a brief silence; then the warrior behind Hsieh said, “Dead men follow us.” “Cypress fears to destroy oil sack,” Hsieh observed. “Otherwise, he sprays us with acid.” “True, but I doubt he is willing to let us escape.” Ruha started down the corridor again, judging they had less than forty paces before it ended in a windowless stone wall. “And we will soon run out of room. I fear the back of this building stands against Temple Hill.” Hsieh caught Ruha by the shoulder. “You stop dead men. We find way out.” Ruha glanced down the corridor at the long line of zombies. The closest was only ten paces away, but was slow and shambling. She nodded. As Hsieh’s warrior began hacking at a door, the witch picked up a small stone lying among the refuse against the wall. She used it to scrape a line up both walls to within a few inches of the ceiling. She connected them with another line on the floor, then laid the rock upon it. The leading corpse was only two steps away. A muffled clamor sounded somewhere in the structure far above, presumably Cypress tearing the roof away. As much as Ruha wanted to glance at the ceiling, there was no time. She spoke the incantation other stone spell. The rock on the floor disappeared, then a shimmering gray wall formed between the three lines the witch had traced on the floor. The first corpse, a dark-haired cult member with an ugly skull wound, arrived at the barrier. He managed to push his head and one arm through before the magic wall

turned as solid as granite. The zombie remained there, reaching for the witch’s oil sack and moaning in the plaintive, incoherent voice of a tormented spirit. Another crash reverberated down from above, this time followed by the clatter of falling rubble. “He is digging his way down through the building!” Ruha cried, spinning toward Hsieh. She completed the turn in time to see an iron bolt shoot through the breach Hsieh’s man had hacked in the door. The dart buried its head in the opposite wall, and the muffled clatter of a bow crank sounded from inside the chamber. The warrior reached through the hole and lifted the crossbar off its supports. “Get on with you!” cried the man on the other side of the door. His voice sounded both fearful and old. “The next one won’t miss!” Hsieh’s soldier shoved the door open and stormed inside, yelling, ‘You dare to attack Shou mandarin!” A heavy thud shook the building; then the ceiling began to crack and groan beneath a great weight. Ruha and Hsieh followed the warrior into a small, windowless shop filled with the cluttered shelves of an apothecary. The soldier was leaning over a chest-high counter, holding his sword to the throat of a mousy, squint-eyed man. On the counter lay an empty crossbow and a crucible heating over the flame of an alcohol lamp. As soon as she saw the lamp’s blue flame, Ruha’s heart skipped a beat. If she could use such a hot fire to cast her most powerful sun spell, even Cypress would be helpless to defend himself. She stepped toward the apothecary, but Hsieh spoke before she could ask the old man if he had any brimstone. “Where is Number Two Exit?” Hsieh demanded, his gaze darting from one cramped corner to the next. “Isn’t one.” “What is this material?” Hsieh stepped to the outside wall and ran his fingers over the smooth, white-washed surface. “Wattle and daub,” the apothecary answered. When the mandarin did not seem to understand, Ruha said, “A sort of mud plaster.” The planks above their heads creaked, then began to pop and crack. The chandelier above the apothecary’s counter started to swing, and Ruha looked up to see the exposed joist logs bowing directly over their heads. The dragon knew exactly where they were, and it took the witch only an instant to guess how. If the smell ofylang oil had led her to Hsieh earlier, then certainly the dragon, with his much larger nose, could track them by the same scent. A tremendous splintering filled the room as five huge talons pierced the ceiling. The apothecary wailed and dropped to his knees behind the counter, and Hsieh shoved his warrior toward the outside wall. “Kick hole.” The claws began to rip through planks of thick wood as if they were made of paper. Hsieh’s soldier sheathed his sword and stepped back to get a running start, and Ruha leaned over the counter to look at the cowering apothecary. “Have you brimstone?” When the man only looked at her with terrified eyes, she yelled, “Brimstone powder—now!” The dragon’s fist closed around a joist log and started to tug. The beam, a rough-hewn pine trunk as thick as an ogre’s leg, groaned and bowed, but it would not break—at least not easily. Hsieh’s man charged across the room, then picked up both feet and attacked with a flying, twolegged stomp kick. The daub cracked beneath his heels, and he crashed through the wall to disappear outside. The apothecary shoved an open bottle of yellow powder onto the counter and ducked out of sight again. Ruha grabbed the lamp from beneath the crucible and pulled the wick stopper. The cloth was still saturated with alcohol, so the flame continued to burn as she poured the fuel into the brimstone bottle. A deep, rumbling grunt shook the shop. The joist log snapped with a mighty crack, and the ceiling sagged beneath Cypress’s weight. The dragon tore a handful of wood away, creating a hole twice the size of a door. Hsieh stepped to Ruha’s side. “You must come now!” “In a moment.” Holding the saturated brimstone in one hand and the flickering lamp wick in the other, Ruha turned to face Cypress. “First I must stop the dragon.” “That will not be so easy as you think!” Cypress’s voice boomed through the empty hole as loud as thunder. J have learned to be wary of you. The dragon’s second sentence tolled through Ruha’s head like a striking bell, shattering her concentration She tried to summon the incantation of her most powerful sun spell, but could not. Did you think I had to see your eyes to attack your mind? The words echoed back and forth through Ruha’s head, building on each other, growing louder and sharper with every reverberation. Any contact will do. Ruha tried to bring the flickering wick to the brimstone bottle, but her body did not seem to hear her wishes. Her hands remained a foot apart, shaking with the memory of what she had intended, yet unable to obey. The wick in her hand sputtered and smoked darkly as it ran out of alcohol and began to consume itself instead. “Why do you wait?” Hsieh demanded. “Cast spell!” The sound of cracking wood filled the chamber once again, and the ceiling sagged almost to their heads as the dragon lay on the floor above. When Ruha did not move, Hsieh apparently realized what was wrong. He pulled a lasal leaf from his pocket and slipped it between her lips. The witch allowed it to fall from her mouth; if they were to have any chance of escaping the dragon, she could not allow a lasal haze to cloud her mind. Hsieh watched the leaf flutter to the floor, then pulled his dagger from its sheath. “So sorry, Lady Witch.” He cut the rope hanging over her shoulder and took the sack of oil. “Must not let

dragon have ylang oil.” The dragon’s withered hand came through the hole and snaked toward the witch. The mandarin quickly stepped away, then turned and threw himself through the opening in the wall. Cypress’s talons stopped a foot short of Ruha, and the din assailing her head quieted to a dull roar. The lamp wick hissed and flickered and began to shrink. The witch considered trying to resist the dragon’s mind attack, but he was too powerful to defeat. Instead, she let all her defenses down, envisioning her mind as the great hall of an empty Heartlands castle, where even the slightest sound reverberated like a drum. What is happening to you? Cypress demanded. Where is the oil? Ruha made no reply, allowing the dragon’s words to crash through her mind with such force they shattered the walls of the hall she had envisioned. The ruse worked. Cypress’s hand suddenly pulled away, and the cacophony in Ruha’s mind quieted as he sniffed out the ylang oil. Her hand obeyed when she tried to move it; even the dragon could not focus his attention in two different places at once. She pushed the bottom of the wick into the mixture of brimstone and alcohol. The flame quickly returned to its steady blue gleam, but the witch forced herself not to think about her sun spell. The dragon was still inside her head, and he would feel the effort of summoning the incantation from her memory. Ruha had to wait only an instant before Cypress’s head shot through the hole, his nostrils flaring as he tried to sniff out the fading scent of Hsieh’s oil-soaked body. The witch hurled her bottle at an eye socket. The dragon flinched away, and the glass shattered against the side of his head. The burning wick instantly touched off the mixture of alcohol and sulfur, filling the chamber with a searing blue-yellow flash. Cypress bellowed in shock and pulled his burning face out of the chamber. Ruha stepped over to the hole,

summoning her incantation as she went. She saw the dragon’s head more than two stories above, shaking madly from side to side, trailing long tails of sapphire and amber flame. The witch thrust her hand toward the fire and spoke her incantation. The blaze erupted into a blistering orb of white-hot flame, as brilliant as the sun in the sky and twice as large. The dragon wailed in anguish. When he raised his claws to his face, they caught fire and started to burn with a flickering yellow flame. He started to dance about, and Ruha heard a tremendous crash in the next room as one of his heavy feet came through the ceiling. Burning scales began to flutter off his head and touch off fires on the floors above. Cypress raised his wings, then roared in fury and launched himself into the air. The witch turned away from the conflagration and saw the astonished apothecary standing behind his counter, his rheumy eyes fixed on the fiery hole over his head. She pulled him from behind the counter. “Come along. We had better leave this place,” she said dragging the old man toward the hole in the wall. “Perhaps you would be kind enough to guide me to the Jailgates?” Sixteen Deep in the Jailgates’ thick foundations, Ruha caught herself staring at Yanseldara’s cataleptic face. The Lady Lord lay in an infirmary bed, a honeyhaired beauty with the slender face and sharply delicate features of a half- ^ elf. Save for the amethyst circles
beneath her eyes, her skin was as pale as pearl. Her cheeks were hollow from the lack of eating, her lips as gray as ash, her brow lined by the strain of a wicked and endless nightmare. She could easily lack the strength to carry a message to Lady Feng, even ifVaerana would agree to try Hsieh’s potion. Ruha turned to the Lady Constable who, despite having been knocked through a mud-brick wall by Cypress’s tail, sat in a chair next to Yanseldara’s bed. A priest had already examined and straightened the swollen purple mass that had once been Vaerana’s knee, but Minister Hsieh had volunteered to sew up her many deep cuts. He was sitting beside her now, smiling contentedly each time he pushed the needle into a long gash along her jawline. Ruha said, “Vaerana, I am sorry to interrupt while you are being attended to, but we have something to discuss.” “Please to wait until I finish here,” said Hsieh. “Or scar will be most unflattering.” The mandarin’s voice was hoarse and raspy, no doubt from breathing the dusky smoke that pervaded even thep>