Dragontiarna: Thieves

by Moeller, Jonathan

  “No,” said Moriah. “Do you have my take from the last job?”

  Helmut nodded, lifted a leather pouch, and passed it to her. Moriah did not bother to count the coins inside it. They were long past the point of such petty betrayals, and each knew enough to bring ruin to the other.

  “And whom,” said Helmut, “did the Wraith grace with his presence tonight?”

  Despite her dark mood, Moriah grinned. “The honorable Lord Hadrian Vindon.”

  Helmut blinked, and then let out a hearty laugh. Moriah felt her smile widen, and she reached into her coat and drew out Lord Hadrian’s golden chain, letting the medallion at its end swing and flash in the light from the hearth.

  “God and the saints!” said Helmut. “I recognize that thing. Lord Hadrian wears it whenever he goes in public. Gaudy damned chain.” Moriah passed it to him, and Helmut tossed it to himself a few times, gauging the weight. “Ugly piece, but valuable. It will have to be melted down, of course, and the gems sold quietly. But we should get a fair price for it.”

  Moriah nodded and reached into her coat, drawing out the gems she had taken from Hadrian’s tower. She kept the coins for herself. But Helmut would liquidate the gems for her, and then they would each claim half of the resultant take. Moriah would have gotten more money if she had sold the gems herself, but that would take too much time from her campaign against the Drakocenti, and Helmut was trustworthy.

  “Splendid, my dear, absolutely splendid,” said Helmut, examining a pair of emeralds. “Your largest haul yet. It will take some time to liquidate, you understand, but the profits should be considerable.”

  “Good,” said Moriah. “I’ll need the money soon enough. I expect I will have to bribe some people within the next month.”

  Helmut inclined his head. “You will have to be careful. The arrival of Prince Accolon has thrown the city into an uproar. Well, more of an uproar than it already was.”

  Moriah leaned closer. “Tell me more. I haven’t heard much. I spent all day washing Lord Hadrian’s bed linens.” Helmut snorted. “I heard the guests at his party talking, but I don’t know the details.”

  “It happened today,” said Helmut. “Here is what I learned from my friends at the Palace.” Moriah inclined her head. “It seems that after your half-sister committed suicide,” Moriah felt her mouth tighten, “Prince Accolon retreated to the Shield Knight’s town of Castarium to become a monastic novice.”

  Moriah snorted. “I doubt that lasted.”

  “No,” agreed Helmut. “It seems that a world gate opened outside of Castarium, and creatures from another world attacked. Dragons and some creatures called goblins.”

  “What?” said Moriah. It sounded ridiculous. But she knew that such things happened. When she had been a child, the Frostborn had come through a magical gate from another world and nearly destroyed Andomhaim. And humanity had come from another world called Old Earth, but Moriah didn’t care about that. Dusty history did not concern her.

  “The Shield Knight and the Keeper destroyed the goblins and closed their gate,” said Helmut. “But it seems that Abbot Caldorman of the Monastery of St. Bartholomew and some of the monks were Drakocenti. After the battle, they tried to kill Prince Accolon.” He seemed to brace himself. “Caldorman boasted that he had murdered Caitrin Rhosmor and made it look like a suicide to draw Accolon to Castarium in hopes of killing him during the fighting.”

  “I see,” said Moriah.

  For a moment, she felt nothing, and then fresh rage exploded through her. She hadn’t been all that close with Caitrin, but she had still been Moriah’s sister. And the Drakocenti had murdered her to get at Accolon? Those damned Drakocenti. They had taken Delwen and Gunther and Caitrin from her? She would make them pay, she would ruin them utterly…

  “Wait,” said Moriah, her brain catching up to her fury. “Wait. How did the Drakocenti know that this gate was going to open?”

  Helmut shrugged. “Maybe they opened it themselves.”

  “Damnation,” said Moriah. She had known the Drakocenti were dangerous. But did they have the power to open gates to other worlds?

  Apparently, they did.

  “Aye,” said Helmut, voice quiet. “It seems our foes are more powerful than we knew.”

  “So why did Accolon come here?” said Moriah.

  “It appears that Caldorman transferred most of his monastery’s wealth to the Scepter Bank,” said Helmut. He shrugged. “Additionally, so many villagers have been displaced by the enclosures that the High King has decided to act. He’s given his son authority to act as Prince Tywall’s overlord, to investigate and command Cintarra and its lords as he sees fit.”

  Moriah let out a hard laugh. “The Regency Council won’t like that.”

  “They will not,” said Helmut. “I suspect it is only a matter of time before they try to have Accolon killed.”

  Moriah nodded. “Then we shall have to trust to our own devices, won’t we? If the Drakocenti are to be stopped, it is up to us. The Regency Council might kill Accolon, or perhaps they’ll just offer him enough of a bribe to make the enclosures legal.”

  “I thought as much,” said Helmut. “I think the High King is a just man…but as we halflings know, just lords often have cruel sons. Given how many mistresses Prince Accolon has taken,” including Moriah’s sister, “then he is likely a man of low character and no honor. But his arrival presents an opportunity.”

  “Oh?” said Moriah. “How so?”

  “Tomorrow night,” said Helmut, “the Regency Council is holding a banquet in the Prince’s Palace in honor of Accolon Pendragon’s arrival. The entire Regency Council will be there…and it would be a perfect opportunity to embarrass one of the lords.”

  Moriah blinked and then smiled as she understood.

  Yes, this would be a perfect opportunity to damage the prestige of the Regency Council…and she knew just the way to do it.

  ***

  Chapter 6: An Alliance Of Necessity

  On the day of his wedding, Sir Tyrcamber Rigamond found himself thinking about the Shield Knight and the Keeper of Andomhaim.

  Tyrcamber rode south in haste, accompanied by his companions and two thousand soldiers. Five hundred of the soldiers were serjeants of the Order of Embers, one of the five Imperial Orders and the Order to which Tyrcamber had belonged before he had become a Dragontiarna Knight. Five hundred more serjeants belonged to the Order of Iron. A thousand of the soldiers were gnollish mercenaries from Culachar, hulking creatures with furry hides and heads like hyenas. The gnolls smelled foul and would eat nearly anything, but they were ferocious fighters on the battlefield.

  The serjeants and Lord Nakhrakh’s gnollish mercenaries had accompanied Tyrcamber on his campaign in Valstrasia to liberate the duchy and Castle Grimnir from the forces of the dark elven lord called the Signifier. The campaign had been successful. All Valstrasia was now liberated from the shattered remnants of the Valedictor’s great horde, and Duke Hulderic Grimnir ruled from his ancestral castle once more. What was more, Duke Hulderic was now firmly allied with Tyrcamber’s father, and Duke Chilmar Rigamond was a step closer to having enough nobles allied with him to force the election of a new Emperor.

  But it had been a strange battle. The Signifier had fled through a gate to another world, a peculiar world with no sky fire, weaker magic…and no Malison. Another kingdom of men ruled there, survivors from the ancient land of Britannia on Old Earth who had founded a realm called Andomhaim. To defeat the Signifier, Tyrcamber had made an alliance with the Shield Knight, a man named Ridmark Arban who wielded a magical sword of immense power. His wife Calliande was the Keeper of Andomhaim. Tyrcamber was unsure of what duties and rights the office of Keeper bestowed, but Calliande was a sorceress of immense power, likely the single strongest human wielder of magic that Tyrcamber had ever encountered.

  That powerful sorceress had been wed to the mighty warrior.

  And while first impressions were always deceiving, Tyrcamber had thought the marria
ge a happy one. Certainly, the Shield Knight and the Keeper trusted one another and had worked together during the final battle against the Signifier’s army and his dragons. Calliande’s magic had protected the army, while Ridmark had unlocked the power of his magical sword and slain the Signifier.

  How many other noble-born husbands and wives, Tyrcamber wondered, loved and trusted one another?

  Not many, he suspected.

  Tyrcamber knew his mother and father hadn’t been fond of one another, despite having five sons and one daughter. Chilmar Rigamond ruled his duchy of Chalons with an iron fist, and he governed his household and his family with the same rigor. Tyrcamber’s mother had died when he had been young, but he remembered her staring at his father with sullen resentment and Chilmar’s own indifference to her feelings and opinions. Tyrcamber had met countless other noble families across the Empire, and sometimes their marriages seemed cold, loveless things. The lord busied himself with war and amused himself with his mistresses, and the lady raised the children and managed the household.

  Tyrcamber supposed happy marriages were possible among nobles. His sister Adalhaid was happy with her husband Duke Faramund Berengar of Mourdrech. Yet Tyrcamber knew that part of that happiness was that Adalhaid had turned her husband against Duke Chilmar. Faramund and Chilmar were allied to defend the Frankish Empire and raise a new Emperor, but they agreed on nothing else, mostly at Adalhaid’s urging.

  And Tyrcamber had his own reasons to look on marriage with trepidation.

  He was no longer entirely human, and perhaps no longer completely sane.

  The transformation of the Malison had taken him, and he had become a Dragontiarna Knight, the first since the defeat of the Dragon Imperator decades ago. Tyrcamber had won the victory at Sinderost, killing the Valedictor and shattering his host. But the cost had been immense. Thousands of men had died. And Tyrcamber had paid a steep price as well. To master the Malison, to keep it from enslaving him, the Guardian Rilmael had taken Tyrcamber to the Chamber of the Sight, where he had lived the experience of transforming and losing himself to the power of the Malison.

  Over and over again.

  It had taken about an hour. But from Tyrcamber’s perspective, thousands of years had passed as he relived his transformation and enslavement dozens of times. Sometimes he thought that his life now as a Dragontiarna Knight was a dream, and the reality was the enslavement he had endured in the Chamber of the Sight. Other times he woke up in his tent, covered in sweat and shivering, and he could not remember where he was or what he was doing. Tyrcamber had resisted the power of the Malison and still possessed his own will, but he feared that he would lose his mind to madness.

  “Almost there,” said a familiar, boisterous voice.

  Tyrcamber glanced back. He rode at the head of his small army, the banners of the Order of Embers, the Order of Iron, and Culachar flying from the lances of the standardbearers. The serjeants marched or rode in a long column behind him, some of them hanging back to guard the supply train. The gnolls screened the flanks, marching in irregular packs. Their keen noses and feral instincts made them excellent hunters, and it was difficult to surprise an army fortunate enough to have gnollish scouts. On the east, left of the road, flowed the broad River Bellex, sluggishly making its way to the Imperial capital of Sinderost and the southern sea.

  The sheet of the sky fire blazed overhead, yellow-orange behind intermittent clouds, glowing with the light of mid-morning.

  Two knights rode next to Tyrcamber, and one more walked on foot and led a griffin by the reins. The mounted knights were Sir Daniel Tremond of the Order of the Third Eye and Sir Angaric Medraut of the Order of Embers. Daniel was lean, clean-shaven, and quiet, while Angaric was paunchy, heavily bearded, and loud. Behind them, Sir Olivier de Falconberg led his griffin Thunder Cloud. The Knight of the Griffin was a lean, weathered-looking man who wore leather armor since the extra weight of chain mail slowed his mount.

  “Aye,” said Sir Olivier in response to Angaric. “Another mile or so to Sinderost.”

  Angaric grinned, reached over, and clapped Tyrcamber on the shoulder. “And then our glorious leader here shall be wedded and bedded.”

  Tyrcamber just stopped himself from grimacing. “So I shall.”

  “A joyous occasion,” said Daniel, solemn as always. “When man and woman become one flesh before the eyes of God.”

  Olivier looked at Angaric. “I suppose that you plan to become one with a skin of wine.”

  Angaric snorted. “You wound me, sir, with your cruel mockery. I plan to become one with an entire barrel of wine. How better to honor the marriage of the Empire’s only Dragontiarna Knight, the mighty Siegebreaker himself?”

  “For God’s sake,” said Tyrcamber.

  “And I hear your bride-to-be is fair enough,” said Angaric, his grin just short of a leer. Angaric did not have much use for women, save for the most elemental, and at various times he had spoken of sampling every brothel in the Empire and writing a guidebook, or developing a detailed system for rating and measuring the beauty of women, so that a man could decide which woman was the most beautiful of all. “She had the withering plague, aye, but it doesn’t seem to have hurt her looks much. And she’ll be mute! You’ll be the envy of all men, my friend. A beautiful woman in your bed and she can’t show you the rough side of her tongue. It would be a better world if women spoke less.”

  “That is the future Lady Rigamond we are speaking of,” said Daniel. “Perhaps you should use more respect.”

  “Aye, that is true,” said Angaric without a trace of guilt. “The future Lady Rigamond will be both lovely and mute, and…”

  Tyrcamber laughed despite himself, half-annoyed, half-amused.

  He was grateful for the presence of his friends. Men held him in awe now – the Siegebreaker, the Dragontiarna Knight who lifted the siege of Sinderost and slew the Valedictor. The amazement and fear quickly became tiresome. But Angaric, Daniel, and Olivier had all met Tyrcamber years before, when he had been a knight of the Order of Embers, traveling around the Empire to fight against the enemies of mankind. They remembered him as the man he was, not the man he had become, and they spoke to him like he was still Sir Tyrcamber of the Order of Embers, not the sole Dragontiarna Knight of the Empire.

  He just wished they did not have to accompany him to his wedding.

  Tyrcamber wished that he didn’t have to go to his wedding.

  But he was a creature of duty, which was perhaps the one thing he still shared with the man he had been before the transformation of the Malison, so he rode on.

  As Olivier had predicted, the city of Sinderost came into sight a mile or so later.

  The capital of the Empire occupied the wedge of land where the River Nabia flowed into the River Bellex. Once it had been Cathair Sindar, a city of the cloak elves, but it had been abandoned during the cloak elves’ long defeat and retreat to the hidden city of Cathair Kaldran. The first Emperor Roland and his knights had settled in the abandoned city. As the Empire had grown, so had Sinderost, and now it was divided into an Old City and a New City. The walls of the New City were of human construction, still scarred and battered from the Valedictor’s attack.

  The gate was still broken. Masons toiled to rebuild the damaged wall and raise the gates again. Until the gate was repaired, Sinderost was vulnerable to attack. Fortunately, the Valedictor’s horde had been shattered, and none of his former soldiers, whether goblin, muridach, or ogre, remained on the western side of the River Bellex.

  Unfortunately, the remnants of the Valedictor’s army were not the only foes the Empire faced. Duke Merovech Valdraxis and the Dragon Cult were moving, and so were the undead forces of the Fallen Order. Tyrcamber would have to leave Sinderost at once to join the loyalist forces moving against the Dragon Cult and the necromancers.

  Which meant he would be married today, and back on the march tomorrow.

  They rode through the ruined gate and into the New City of Sinderost. Tyrcamber looked a
round the northern square and remembered the desperate fighting. He remembered watching the Emperor fall in battle, remembered the Dragon Curse taking hold of him and the transformation beginning.

  But Rilmael had found Tyrcamber, taken him to the Chamber of the Sight, and Tyrcamber had transformed and died.

  Again, and again, and again, for thousands of years.

  But another memory came to him, and he focused on it, if only because it was less grim than the others.

  ###

  “You need to get married,” Duke Chilmar Rigamond had told Tyrcamber four months ago.

  It was the last thing he had expected his father to say.

  “What?” said Tyrcamber at last.

  It had been a year and a half after the death of the Valedictor and the breaking of his army. Victory had come to the Empire, but it had brought no peace. The Emperor was dead, and the Dukes had been unable to gather to elect his successor. Much of the eastern Frankish Empire was still in the hands of the Valedictor’s vassals and captains.

  Worse, the Empire faced powerful enemies from within.

  Duke Merovech Valdraxis, despairing of victory against the Valedictor, had allied with the Dragon Cult. Their dark arts had transformed him into a Dragonmaeloch. Like Tyrcamber, Merovech could not be dominated or controlled while in dragon form. Unlike Tyrcamber, the transformation had destroyed Merovech’s sanity and filled him with an insatiable bloodlust. The Dragon Cult had come out of hiding, and many nobles that Tyrcamber had thought loyal had forsaken both their oaths to the Empire and the faith of the Imperial Church to follow the Path of the Dragon and the teachings of the Theophract. Merovech had gathered a large army in the central Empire, and he might have enough strength to conquer the Empire and claim the Imperial crown in a tide of blood.

  That was bad enough, but the Fallen Order was just as dangerous.