Vengeance of Dragons (Secret Texts) (39 page)
BOOK: Vengeance of Dragons (Secret Texts)
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She could tell they’d joined a queue waiting to get through the gate because the cart rolled forward and stopped. Rolled forward and stopped. Rolled forward and stopped. Each time they rolled closer, she could hear the taxman at the gate more clearly, and each time she noted his hostility toward the people in line her apprehension grew. Everyone hidden within the hay huddled in silence, afraid to move or breathe.
Finally they reached the head of the queue. Outside the cart, so close she could have reached through to touch him, the guard dog sat and panted.
“Family?” the taxman asked.
“Ainthe-Aburguille, distantly. No
Family
affiliation.”
Family
affiliation.”
“Cargo?”
“Straw, thirty bales.” Trev sounded bored, as if this were something he did every day. Kait marveled at his control. She was certain that she would have been sitting there thinking about the people hiding in the back of the wagon and what would happen to them and her if they got caught, had she been in his seat.
“Destination?”
“Low Kafar-by-the-Sea.”
She frowned. She’d never heard of such a place.
The taxman apparently had, however. “That’s a far piece to haul straw.” The taxman didn’t sound so hostile anymore.
“Got to sell it. Doesn’t really matter where. So I figured to make the trip and see family out that way while I’m there. The folks in Kafar will buy from me because they know me, and I can check in on my da and my ma and my little brothers. Got one supposed to apprentice with me this season; maybe I can pick him up this trip.”
The dog snuffled along the baseboard of the wagon—happy, panting sounds. He could give them away at any time . . . and Hasmal had taught her that magic affected animals less reliably than it did people. She put her concentration into maintaining the shield, and prayed it would hold.
The taxman said, “Good to have a business where you can fit family into work. Spent my early years on the sea, I did, and the sea doesn’t offer such amenities. When the fish run, you run with them.”
Kait wished the fish had eaten the taxman; the longer he chatted with Trev, the more likely someone hidden within the straw was to move or sneeze or cough, and no magical shield would cover that. She could feel her nose and her back beginning to itch, all because she didn’t dare scratch them. The straw poked and tickled her, and the mildewed, damp stink of it clogged her nose. She could imagine how the others felt.
“My da fished when he was young enough. Tough work,” Trev said.
“It’s that. Thirty bales, you say? Wouldn’t have thought that cart to hold more than twenty-five.”
“Some of them are small.”
“Explains it. Tell you what—you can pay transit for twenty-five. That’ll be three ox an’ habbut. An’, hey—what road you takin’ out of the city?”
“Either South Great Pike or Shearing Head.”
“Pah! if you take the Dally Furlong south to Slow Walk, you can cut half a day and three gates off your trip. It’s the way I take going home. You go that way, you want to stop at the Red Heach Inn your second day from here. My cousin owns it, can give you a deal if you mention I sent you.”
“And who do I tell him sent me?”
“You say Tooley. He’ll cut you a full ox off the season rate.”
“My thanks, Tooley. I’ll remember you to your cousin.”
Kait heard the slap of the reins and the snap of the whip, and one of the horses snorted. The wagon jerked and rolled forward again. Before they were out of Calimekka, they would face at least half a dozen more checkpoints, and if the Dragons began a concentrated search for them, each checkpoint would become more dangerous than the one before it.
And that brought her back to thoughts of betrayal . . . and Ian. She’d been asking Dùghall something before they were interrupted. Something about just that. She tried to relocate her thoughts, and finally had them.
She’d asked Dùghall if he’d introduced Ian to the Reborn, and Dùghall had told her he
had
.
had
.
“Dùghall,” she asked, “how could Ian have chosen to side with the Dragons after he met Solander? I understand free choice . . . but how
could
he choose their hatred and their evil and turn his back on the Reborn’s love?”
could
he choose their hatred and their evil and turn his back on the Reborn’s love?”
“What difference would the Reborn make to him now?”
Kait frowned. “Every difference.” She was missing something—Dùghall didn’t seem to think it strange at all that Ian could turn away to evil after having experienced joy, while she thought it would be impossible. “I could never betray the Reborn,” she said.
Dùghall covered his eyes with his forearm. “Godsall, you don’t know,” he groaned.
“I don’t?” She looked at Ry, who shrugged. “What don’t I know?”
Dùghall just shook his head, and left his arm over his face. Hasmal glanced at him, saw that he wasn’t going to move, and sat up straighter. He studied her with weary, swollen, red eyes. “The Reborn is dead,” he said.
Kait tried to put those words into a frame that made sense. The Reborn dead? No. Vincalis’s Secret Texts had clearly and correctly described the return of the Reborn, the rise of the Dragons against him. The Texts went on to describe a multitude of things that hadn’t happened yet—battles the Falcons and the Dragons would fight, cities that would be born and cities that would die, and Solander’s eventual but total triumph over his age-old enemies.
If Vincalis had seen the future so clearly, he would have seen such a thing as the Reborn’s death. He hadn’t. His prophecies didn’t even allow for such a possibility.
“That can’t be,” Kait said.
Dùghall muttered, “And you know, eh? You, who aren’t a true Falcon?” He didn’t look at her. He just lay there, face hidden.
“I know he can’t be dead, because if he is, then what of the prophecies?”
“You can’t let this alone, can you?” Her uncle sat up slowly and stared into her eyes. “The prophecies are dead, too. The bright future, hope for Ibera and the rest of the world . . . it’s all dead.”
In short, harsh sentences, despair reverberating in his every word, he told her what he’d found out. That other Falcons had been with the Reborn at the moment when Danya had moved him within an impenetrable shield. That, when she brought the baby’s body out of the shield stations later, the soul inside it had no longer been Solander’s—that it had belonged to a Dragon. No one knew why she had done this thing. But she had, and the Reborn was dead, and the future had died with him.
Kait tried to hold that thought in her mind. It wouldn’t stay. She kept thinking of the wondrous radiance, the complete, uncritical love that had infused her when she touched the baby’s soul, and she could not accept that he was gone. That his life had been snuffed out. That her own cousin, his mother, had either destroyed him or allowed him to be destroyed.
“You’ve missed something,” she insisted. “You’ve overlooked something; he’s managed to hide himself away; he was in danger from the Dragons and he discovered it and shielded himself so that you can’t find him right now. Something of that nature. He isn’t dead.”
Dùghall shrugged. “Believe what you wish. I have sought him, I have spoken through mirror and blood with others who were there when this horror came to pass, and the Reborn is dead.”
Kait tried to imagine what it would mean if what he said were true; if they had already lost the fight before it was well begun. She looked into the well of despair that had swallowed Dùghall and Hasmal, and for a moment experienced the simplicity that despair brought. If she admitted loss, she wouldn’t have to do anything else. If she admitted that the Reborn was dead and that the future was hopeless, she could give up and mourn the fate of the world, and she would be relieved from any responsibility. It was a seductive thought. She could find someplace to hide and let the world take care of itself.
But she wasn’t made for despair. She’d overcome too much just to survive; she couldn’t accept defeat without fighting. She decided to act as if the Reborn had survived and was hiding to protect himself. If she found out for certain that he was dead, she would reconsider the merits of despair, but not until then.
She became aware that beside her Ry sat weeping.
40
T
he Dragons clustered around the long table in the Sabir meeting room and crowded back to the walls; more than two hundred stood present, wearing the strongest, most flawless, most beautiful bodies in all of Calimekka.
he Dragons clustered around the long table in the Sabir meeting room and crowded back to the walls; more than two hundred stood present, wearing the strongest, most flawless, most beautiful bodies in all of Calimekka.
Dafril, wearing the body of Crispin Sabir, stood at the head of the table—he would have been leader no matter which body he’d chosen, but this one made his task easier. It was powerful, it was attractive, and it was highborn. He raised a hand and even the little whispers of fear and consternation ceased.
“I know we swore not to meet until each of you reached your designated target, but we have an emergency that threatens all of us. Mellayne has been taken from us, and barring miracles, is not likely to be restored to us in any form.”
Dafril felt his colleagues’ unease, and knew it well. His own gut still twisted at the horror of this unexpected disaster that had befallen them.
“What do you mean, ‘taken from us’?” a delicate beauty with ebony skin and golden eyes asked. Dafril couldn’t place her yet—she was certainly one of the lesser Dragons, maybe Tanden or Shorre or even Lusche—but she had good taste in bodies. Hers touched on every physical preference he had and improved on it. His thoughts flicked for just an instant to a picture of the two of them as the couple who ruled Matrin, and he liked what he saw. He thought that after he reassured himself that she was one of the agreeable young Dragons who admired him, he would tell her he’d chosen her as his consort.
He managed a smile for her that intimated his appreciation of her intelligence in asking the question and said, “I truly mean ‘taken.’ Falcons are hiding in Calimekka right now, and last night they tore Mellayne’s soul from his body and trapped it in a ring that belonged to one of them.”
Their massed unease became outright horror.
“A ring?”
“What—some piece of jewelry?”
“With no escape vector?”
“How could they?”
Dafril raised a hand and said, “According to our source, who has given us a tremendous amount of information, all of which we’ve so far been able to verify independently, the ring used was either gold or electrum, featureless in all respects except for a groove that ran along the circumference of the ring in the center as a form of decoration. The ring bears no designs, no jewels, no writing—in other words, no irregularities of feature that we could use to draw Mellayne back out, even if we could acquire it.”
“Why not create such a feature?” a tall, muscular blond with a huge, drooping mustache asked. He would house one of the sloppy youngsters who never bothered to learn the theory behind what they did—who worked the rote spells without mishap until one day he decided to be clever, and made a little change or took a little shortcut and blew himself and everyone around him into oblivion. Efsqual, perhaps, or Clidwen. Probably Clidwen.
Most of the Dragons were glaring at the questioner—no one appreciated dangerous stupidity.
“What?” the young man asked, looking at all the angry faces. “What would be wrong with that?”
Clidwen, certainly. Pity it hadn’t been his soul caught in a ring.
“Because,” Dafril snapped, “once the soul is bound, any alteration of its housing sufficient to alter its flow through the ring will throw it through the Veil. We wouldn’t get Mellayne back, you idiot. We’d just kill him, same as if we drove a knife through your heart. Where the soul is concerned, a body is a body. You destroy the flow, you kill the body.”
He was tempted to demonstrate. The idiot had waited a thousand years with nothing more pressing than planning for the day of his eventual reembodiment, and he’d spent the time learning nothing.
“This source of yours,” the first questioner asked, “why did he choose to help us? How did he know about us?”
“We had a bit of luck. He was with the Falcons, but never became one of them. And when the girl he loved chose his worst enemy over him, he decided the time had come to go where he would be more welcome.” Dafril pushed his way through the assembled Dragons and opened the tall, arched door at the end of the meeting hall. “Come in, please. We’re ready for you.”
He smiled at the man who stepped into the room. Ian had shaved his head since their first meeting—the false white-blond hair and false Hmoth hairstyle were both gone. He wore Sabir finery—a fine brushed cotton shirt embroidered with silver trees, coarse-woven emerald green silk breeches, fine black boots. His eyes were not the usual pale Sabir blue or the less common amber, but a fine shade of gray-green. “This is a body-cousin of mine,” he said. “Long lost and surely thought dead—and we can count ourselves lucky that he wasn’t. Please welcome Ian Draclas to our company—the first, but surely not the last, of our willing allies.”
Ian smiled at them. The smile was cold and bitter, and held in it thirst for the destruction of his enemies; hunger for revenge; anger and shame and hatred at the humiliation he’d been dealt. It was, Dafril thought, a good smile. The sort of smile you wanted to see on an ally’s face. As long as the girl loved Ry Sabir, Ian would belong to the Dragons.
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