The Veiled Dragon (34 page)

men—” “We’re staying.” Pierstar picked up a long, steelshanked pike and stepped to the parapets. “If you look like bait, this plan won’t work.” Tang filled the waterskin with air, then pushed the stopper into place and looked over at his mother. She had sealed her nostrils with wax and was breathing shallow and fast in preparation for their dive. The water was creeping up the ledge; already, the prince could feel its coolness lapping at his hips. He pulled his dagger and slipped the tip between the spirit gem and its mounting. “Tang, what do you do?” gasped Lady Feng. “Minister Hsieh says Lady Ruha almost destroys Cypress.” The prince began to work his dagger back and forth. “He contacts us to smash spirit gem.” Lady Feng laid a restraining hand on his arm. “Wait until we escape cave.” “Perhaps we do not escape cave.” Tang continued to pry at the glowing topaz. “Perhaps we drown first.” “Stop! I command you!” Tang obeyed, surprised by his mother’s frightened tone. “What is wrong, Lady Feng? You always say life and death are same!” “They are, but it is great insult for humble scholar to usurp authority of Great Judge by throwing life away.” She did not take her hand from his arm. “And if you

destroy gem, how do we find way out?” The prince waved the butt of the staff toward the dark pool, where the glowing figure of General Fui’s head waited to guide them to safety. “General Fui leads us.” “General Fui is no longer bound to you by duty. Brave Prince. I call him earlier because I sense change in you that, perhaps, earns his respect. But it is difficult for him to be with us. Even most faithful of servants cannot staylong, and in past you have done little to win his loyalty.” Tang let his head drop onto the hard stones and stared at the gray ceiling hanging like a tomb’s lid above his face. He heard again the wet crack as the general was beheaded by his own son. That Fui had answered Lady Feng”s summons at all was a wonder, and that he continued to wait in the dark pool was an even greater marvel. “Fui D’hang was most loyal soldier. Not to follow him now is great insult.” Tang raised his head, then gave his mother a crooked smile. “Besides, we must smash spirit gem. If we die in cavern, it is only way to protect treasure from Cypress.” Lady Feng’s pop eye looked as though it might fall from its socket; then she released her son’s arm. “I get rock.” The prince twisted his dagger, then caught the glowing topaz as it popped free of its mounting. He placed it on the ledge beside him and took the large rock his mother thrust into his palm. Tang lifted the heavy stone to the ceiling, a breath’s length above his face, and positioned it over the gem. “Wicked dragon, when you present yourself before the Ten Courts of Yen-Wang-Yeh, know that Prince Tang sends you there—and may the Great Judge sentence you to an eternity in all Eighteen Hells!” Tang brought his hand down. He felt the topaz shatter beneath the stone, then heard his mother cry out as a powerful concussion hurled them both against the chamber walls. There was an earsplitting wail and a deafening roar; then two flashing lights whirled through the

room, one as silver as the moon and the other as black as obsidian. The prince’s head felt as though it would split, and he found himself struggling for breath against a tremendous weight. He closed his eyes and beseeched his ancestors to make ready for him in the Celestial Bureaucracy. The prayer went unanswered. Almost as soon as they had begun, the wailing and the roaring died. The flashing lights vanished, and the terrible weight was lifted from Tang’s chest. He found himself lying on his back, gasping for breath and staring at the low ceiling, still lit by the crimson glow of General Fui’s spirit. “Tang?” The prince turned his head and saw his mother lying beside him. She looked even paler and older than usual. “Yes, Lady Feng?” “Now may we go?” :^it;•//.* Together, Ruha and Pierstar looked out over Hillshadow Lake’s steaming waters, waiting for the dark figure at the bottom to rise and attack. The war wizards had begun to arrive and take their positions, both on Baldagar Manor and the adjacent mansions. The witch was rubbing a round, fist-sized stone between her palms, wondering if she had misjudged Tang and desperately hoping she had not. She could lure Cypress from the water at any time, but the ensuing battle would mean nothing if the prince had not smashed the spirit gem. The stone grew warm in Ruha’s hands. She continued to rub her hands over it, more to calm her nerves than to increase the effectiveness of her magic. She would have time to hurl only one spell at Cypress, but she did not want it to be so powerful it drove him away. Her job was to draw the dragon onto the roof of Baldagar Manor. Pierstar and his Maces would do the rest. The ballista crews hiding in the adjacent buildings

closed their window shutters. The last of the war wizards arrived and took their places, and still the dragon did not move. Ruha’s heart sank, and she reluctantly turned to face Pierstar. “I fear Prince Tang has not changed. Perhaps I

” A dreadful sputter broke over the parapets, and Ruha let her sentence trail off. She looked toward the lake and saw huge geysers of steam rising from its heart. Just beneath the roiling green surface, the amber globe of her sun spell was rapidly growing larger, with the murky figure of Cypress’s body rising beneath it like a swelling black cloud. “Prepare yourselves!” yelled Pierstar. An anxious clatter rattled across the roof as the Maces and their war wizards steeled themselves for battle. Cypress erupted from the lake with the roar of a volcano, flinging a spray of boiling water and hissing steam in all directions. Though the golden fire had burned the scaly hide completely off his wings, that did not prevent them from lifting him into the air as the charred bones curled and undulated like so many clattering fingers. It was impossible to see through the blazing globe at the end of his neck, but the rest of his body, aside from a broad scattering of melted scales and the scorched stumps at the ends of his arms, looked remarkably intact. Ruha set her stone on the parapet, then tucked two of Hsieh’s lasal leaves into the sleeve other aba, where she would be able to reach them quickly. A chain of cracks and loud bangs echoed over the water, the arms of the war engines slamming against their stops. Most of the missiles and nets splashed harmlessly into the water, but three harpoons lodged deep in Cypress’s flanks, and one net tangled in the spindly bones of his wings. The men who had hit quickly looped their lines around stakes driven deep into the ground, while those who had missed rewound their skeins. Cypress roared. He whipped his fire-shrouded head

around his body, and the instant the golden flames touched the harpoon lines and the net, they flashed and dissolved. The dragon’s wings siffled through the air, and he began to rise again. “Shut your eyes, Maces!” Pierstar ordered. “Now, Ruha!” The witch uttered her counterspell. At the end of Cypress’s neck, the fiery globe burst apart with a white flash so brilliant she saw it even through her eyelids. Summoning her stone spell to mind, she grabbed her rock and looked toward the dragon. Cypress hung over the lake almost motionless, the tips of his skeletal wings fluttering as though that tiny motion were enough to hold his hulking mass aloft. At the end of his neck hung a smoking lump of melted bone that vaguely resembled a head. Glowing masses of cinder filled his empty eye sockets, and his long snout had fused into a stubby, tangled mass of fangs and jaw. Only his ebony horns had emerged from the conflagration unscathed, and even they made the air shimmer with heat. Ruha hissed her spell and hurled the stone. The rock disappeared with a thunderous crack. It reappeared in the same instant, shattering Cypress’s temple. The dragon’s wing tips stopped waving. His gruesome chin dropped as he watched the splinters of scorched bone flutter into the water below. He brought his head up and looked toward Baldagar Manor. You! Ruha barely managed to stuff the lasal leaves into her mouth before a fiery yellow sun burst inside her head. She heard Pierstar and his men cry out in astonishment, then felt herself sailing backward across the roof. Chew the leaves, she told herself. Even as the words reverberated through her skull, she slammed down and went tumbling across the roof. If the fall caused her any injury, the witch did not know it; she could feel only the anguish inside her mind, a fiery agony

such as she had never felt. Swimming in boiling tar would have hurt less, or falling naked upon At’ar’s blazing face. She glimpsed Cypress’s murky figure swooping down toward Baldagar Manor; then she rolled one more time and came to rest on her face. A lasal haze filled Ruha’s head, but the dragon’s fury was so great that the fog merely diffused the fire and did not drive it from her mind. The golden blaze became a choking yellow mist, not nearly as hot, but as thick as syrup. She heard screaming and realized it was her own voice. That is but a portion of my pain. The building shook beneath Cypress’s weight, and the voices of screaming Maces joined with that of the witch. Soon, you shall bear it all. “Not all.” Ruha found the strength to raise her head and saw the dragon standing in the middle of the roof, a cloud of dark acid billowing around his mangled snout. “You cannot make Yanseldara love you, and that pain I will never bear!” Then I will make you bear another kind of agony. Cypress’s tail thrashed in anger, smashing through the parapets and sweeping half a dozen men over the side. He stooped over, reaching out as though he had forgotten’t he had only stubs where once he had claws; then a window shutter slammed open. Ruha’s world detonated: the sky went silver with lightning, meteor showers and ice storms chased each other down from the heavens, tongues of flame crackled through the air, crimson bolts and sapphire rays raced from every direction. The dragon’s stump disintegrated before her eyes; a deep, rumbling growl reverberated through her bones, and the roof of Baldagar Manor began to come apart. She leapt up to run for the parapets and felt the floor vanishing beneath her feet. The witch landed amidst a shower of snapped planks and beams, her body erupting into pain despite the cushioning of the soft furniture favored by Elversult

merchants. She lay a long time without moving, halfexpecting Cypress’s scorched skull to appear above her at any moment. Instead, the yellow glow and fiery pain faded from her mind and, much to her surprise, so did the lasal haze—no doubt burned off by the ferocity of the dragon’s attack. At length, the terrible aching in her body also faded, and she began to realize that, other than the dull throbbing of a few new bruises, she had

survived the fall uninjured. Ruha clambered out of the debris and found herself standing amidst the ruins of the mansion’s top story, where the family’s servants and young children had once kept their chambers. She picked her way toward the front of the building, too dazed to think about what she was doing, and discovered that this floor of Baldagar Manor now held nothing but the shattered remnants of the inhabitants’ belongings, two dozen groaning Maces, and the smoking, mangled corpse of a ten-foot river

monitor. As the witch’s ears stopped ringing, she grew aware of

a loud, chugging roar coming from the direction of the water. She rushed forward, then climbed over a collapsed wall onto what had once been a private balcony overlooking Hillshadow Lake. In the center of the lake, a murky green waterspout was stretching skyward, as though trying to grasp a small whirlwind with flashing ribbons of

silver and black luminescence. Ruha heard someone clattering over the collapsed wall

behind her. She turned to see Pierstar Hallowhand’s battered form limping toward her, his eyes fixed on the waterspout in the center of the lake. “What’s that?” he croaked. “That?” The witch whispered an incantation and raised her hand, then started to spin her finger in the direction opposite the whirlwind. The vortex began to lose speed, and the two ribbons came apart. The silver light circled the shoreline once, then streaked away toward the Jailgates and vanished from sight. The black

one was caught by the waterspout and dragged into Hillshadow Lake, where it darkened the water only briefly before sinking into the muddy bottom. “That was nothing—a fool for love, I fear.” Epilogue Even the Shou did not have a table with enough sides for all those at the Great Banquet of Apology, so the servants had set the platters of candied duck and ginger hart upon a round table and arranged seven chairs around it in evenly spaced intervals. Prince Tang himself welcomed each guest at the door, and when Yanseldara entered the room, he produced a long oaken staff with three gnarled fingers gripping the finest ruby from his personal treasury. He held it before him and bowed very low. “I find this in dragon’s lair, Lady Yanseldara,” he said. “I am sorry that I must smash original topaz.” Yanseldara accepted the staff with a sincere smile. “The topaz was ruined by Cypress’s touch, and I thank you for crushing it. I accept this magnificent ruby as a token of the new friendship between the Ginger Palace and Elversult. I shall treasure it always.” Vaerana rolled her eyes, then leaned close to Ruha and, in a voice much too loud, whispered, “I’ll treasure it more if they really stop selling poison!” The servants gasped, and Lady Feng shot an indignant scowl in the Lady Constable’s direction. Hsieh quickly stepped forward and smoothed matters over by personally taking Vaerana’s arm. “If we are all here, perhaps we sit down.” The procession filed somewhat uncomfortably to the table, where the mandarin scowled and turned to Prince Tang. “I see seven chairs, but only six guests.” The prince pointed to a chair with no goblet or flatware. “This is for Lady Ruha’s friend. Captain Fowler. It is most unfortunate he cannot join us.”’ The explanation only drew a deeper scowl from Hsieh. “It is not for Princess Wei Dao?” Tang’s jaw fell. “She dishonors Ginger Palace! I do not set place in her memory!” Hsieh’s uncovered eye narrowed in what Ruha now recognized as a well-practiced expression of displeasure. “Wei Dao is Shou princess. Trouble she cause in Elversuit is of no consequence to Emperor, so it is appropriate to treat her as well as you treat guests.” Before the stupefied prince could respond, the mandarin spun to face Lady Feng, who was holding Winter Blossom on her shoulder and casting covetous glances at the golden serving platters. According to rumor, she had developed a distressing habit of sneaking off to Cypress’s swamp with the Ginger Palace’s finest tableware. “I must offer condolences, Lady Feng,” Hsieh said. “Most High Emperor sends me to invite you to Tai Tung, but your son’s bad manners do not make that possible.” Prince Tang looked first insulted, then relieved. He forced a grave expression and bowed to the mandarin. “Please to pardon, but I never honor Wei Dao at my table.” “Then you never return to Shou Lung.” Tang could not keep from smiling. He turned to Ruha and asked, “Perhaps you sit next to me? I never return to Emperor’s court, so perhaps you consider becoming my Princess?” “I—uh—Brave Prince, I don’t know what to say,” Ruha stammered. Since his return from the dragon’s lair, Tang had shown himself to be a gracious and gallant man, but the witch was not in love with him. “I will be pleased to sit with you, but perhaps we should discuss the rest at