Dragontiarna: Thieves

by Moeller, Jonathan

  Chilmar stared at Tyrcamber and then shrugged again.

  “So be it,” said Chilmar. “Do as you like, Sir Tyrcamber. But if battle comes, we need your aid. It will do us no good for you to heal a few dozen soldiers only for us to lose the army if Duke Merovech comes.”

  “If the enemy comes, I will return, Father,” said Tyrcamber.

  As was so often true, his father’s brutal logic was correct. With the exception of Rilmael, Tyrcamber was the single most dangerous person in the loyalist army. His skills and powers would be better spent waiting for Merovech Valdraxis to strike than helping Ruari. The two hundred or so lives in Grundorf did not count for much when balanced against the entirety of the army and the fate of the Empire.

  And yet…

  He could not refuse to help Ruari, just as he could not have forced himself on her during their wedding night. Perhaps it was the diligent care she had shown to the wounded. Perhaps it was his rage at the sight of her mother berating and belittling her. Or maybe it was her restraint. She had tremendous magical power. Power enough that she could have killed her mother and Sir Charles with ease when they had been bullying her, but instead, she had stood there in silence. Tyrcamber knew he wouldn’t have that restraint.

  Perhaps if he did, he wouldn’t have become a Dragontiarna.

  Ruari wanted to heal, not to destroy.

  Maybe he could help her, at least a little.

  ###

  Grundorf was an unremarkable village. A wooden stockade surrounded a few dozen cottages, a small manor house, and a stone church with a thatched roof. The houses had been built of either lumber or fieldstone. The villagers watched Tyrcamber as he walked past, their eyes wide at the sight of his golden armor and white cloak.

  At Tyrcamber’s command, both the men-at-arms and the villagers gathered in the square before the church. The villagers watched him with wary, frightened expressions. The men-at-arms tried to look brave, but he saw their gnawing fear nonetheless. Death in battle was frightening enough. But death from agonizing illness was in some ways worse, the feeling of helplessness as your own body turned against you.

  Tyrcamber understood. He had experienced the same thing over and over again in the Chamber of the Sight.

  “Hear me!” said Tyrcamber, raising his voice to address everyone. “This is my wife, Lady Ruari Rigamond, and her attendants. Everyone in this village has been exposed to the withering plague. However, I am immune to it, as are all my wife’s maids. We believe we can cure you of the plague before it is too late.”

  “How?” said one old woman.

  “Silence!” said one of the soldiers. “Let the Lord Dragontiarna speak.”

  “My wife has instructions for you,” said Tyrcamber. “Lady Adalberga?”

  He watched in bemused amazement as Ruari took charge of the work. She gestured, and the maids divided the villagers into different groups. Adalberga seemed able to understand Ruari’s gestures and expressions, and when she did not, Ruari scribbled out commands on her wax tablet.

  In short order, Ruari had the women and the young children in the church, the soldiers and the strong young village men in the manor house, and everyone else in the town square. Tyrcamber moved through the manor house twice, using the Sense spell to pinpoint which men had the withering plague. For those who did, he cast the Heal spell upon them. Using magic to cure the withering plague took a tremendous amount of power, especially when cast with fire magic, but Tyrcamber was a Dragontiarna, so the risk of the Malison meant nothing to him. As Adalberga had said, though, it was a trial on the patient. The men screamed and thrashed with agony, sweat pouring down their faces, and collapsed to the floor once the spell was over. But it worked. Tyrcamber’s magic burned the plague out of them, and on his third pass through the house, he was sure that the pestilence had been cleansed.

  A few hours after sundown, there was no withering plague left anywhere in the village of Grunberg.

  ###

  At about midnight, Tyrcamber sat on the church steps, gazing at the sky.

  He was exhausted, but his mind had reached that strange point of weariness where he was too tired to sleep.

  The pale blue light of the nighttime sky fire filled the vault of the heavens. Tyrcamber remembered the night sky he had seen in Andomhaim over the town of Castarium. It had been one of the strangest damned things he had ever seen in a lifetime full of sights both strange and horrifying. The sky had been utterly black but filled with thousands of glittering points of light called stars. For that matter, Andomhaim had thirteen moons, and they appeared and disappeared seemingly at random throughout the night.

  Rilmael had told him what stars were, years ago. There were great spheres of fire, and the worlds were but small spheres of rock that whirled endlessly around them. A bizarre thought, but Tyrcamber liked it. The idea made his own troubles and fears seem small.

  There was a whisper of sound, and he looked up to see Ruari standing over him.

  “My lady,” said Tyrcamber. “You should sleep. You must be even more tired than I am.”

  She sat next to him and held out her wax tablet.

  I WANTED TO TALK TO YOU.

  Tyrcamber blinked. Ruari frowned, grinned, and scribbled a new message.

  IN A MANNER OF SPEAKING.

  Tyrcamber laughed. “I suppose that means you want to ask me questions.”

  Ruari nodded and wrote one on her tablet.

  WHY DID YOU HELP ME?

  Tyrcamber shrugged. “There were many reasons. You are my wife, and I swore to protect you. It seemed unwise to let you go into a plague-infested village alone. What if there was a panic or a riot? The Dominus Christus commanded his followers to look after the sick. I could help the villagers at no danger to myself. So why not?”

  Ruari considered this, slashed her stylus across the tablet twice, and it turned it back to face him.

  She had underlined the words WHY and ME.

  “I…don’t know,” admitted Tyrcamber.

  Ruari waited. She looked as if she could wait until the sea evaporated and the sky fire went out.

  “I remember what you said to me,” said Tyrcamber. “What you wrote to me, I mean. How you wanted to heal and not destroy. That seems noble. And I have destroyed so much, my lady, and I have seen so much destroyed. Half the Empire seemed to burn in the war against the Valedictor.” He shook his head. “And the things…the things that I saw…”

  Tyrcamber told himself to stop talking. Instead, the words kept coming out of him, things he had told no one.

  “People think I became a Dragontiarna Knight because my will was strong, because I could resist the transformation,” said Tyrcamber. “They’re wrong. It cost me a…a great deal. I was one man before the siege of Sinderost, and another after I killed the Valedictor. I…”

  He fell silent. Something warm grasped his left hand, and he looked down and saw Ruari’s hand holding his, her eyes on his face.

  “I used too much magic during the siege of Sinderost,” said Tyrcamber. “I started to transform into a dragon. The Guardian Rilmael saw it. I begged him to kill me, but he took me to his sanctuary. And…I transformed there. I became a dragon. I killed him, and then the Valedictor’s will dominated me. I flew to Sinderost, and he made me into his personal mount, his beast of burden. At his command, I burned Sinderost. In Mourdrech, I killed my sister and her nephews. I helped the Valedictor destroy the Empire and slay mankind. And then for seven hundred years, I helped the Valedictor fight the xiatami and the dwarves and all his other foes. When the ballista bolt found my heart and I died, it was a mercy, a relief.”

  She said nothing, fingers tight against his. Her eyes were like wheels of blue flame in her bloodless face.

  “And then I woke up again in the Guardian’s sanctuary,” said Tyrcamber. “I killed him again. I repeated it all again, right up until my death seven hundred years later. Over and over again. It went on for thousands of years. I don’t know how many times I repeated it. I never tried to c
ount them up, because I might go mad again if I knew. Because I did go mad. I have known every kind of madness there is and come out on the other side again. Eventually, I became angry, so angry, and in that rage, I learned control. That woke me up. Rilmael had taken me to his sanctuary and locked me within a vision, looping it over and over. That was how I learned control. Not by great virtue or by noble heroism, but through rage and destruction. By killing my sister over and over again. By slaughtering thousands of my countrymen. By…by…”

  Ruari raised a gentle hand to brush his cheek, and Tyrcamber realized that he was crying.

  He was stunned. He couldn’t remember the last time he had cried, or he had poured out his heart to someone like this. Maybe he had never been this honest with anyone. It wasn’t something he could have admitted to his friends, his father or his brothers, or anyone. The Empire was not a place that suffered weakness, not when enemies surrounded humanity on every side.

  “I’m sorry,” said Tyrcamber, pulling in a shuddering breath. “I am sorry. I should not…should not…” He shook his head, trying to pull his reeling thoughts back together. “I should not weep. Many more have suffered more than I have. I…”

  She laid a finger across his lips to silence him and then wrote on her tablet again.

  I UNDERSTAND. I HAVE POWER TOO. I GAINED IT IN GREAT PAIN. I ONLY WANT TO USE IT WELL.

  The tablet had run out of space, so Ruari erased it and kept writing.

  I WANT TO HEAL, NOT DESTROY. THANK YOU FOR HELPING ME.

  “I was glad to do it,” said Tyrcamber.

  Ruari wrote again.

  THE SOLDIERS WILL OBEY THE GOLDEN KNIGHT, NOT THE UGLY WOMAN IN A PLAIN DRESS.

  “Ugly?” said Tyrcamber, incredulous. “Do you think that? You saw me on our wedding night. That’s something a man can’t fake. God, you were so beautiful. If you hadn’t been so scared, I would have…”

  Belatedly, he realized that this might not be a suitable topic for conversation. Then he saw that she was smiling.

  “You’re fishing for compliments, aren’t you?” said Tyrcamber.

  Ruari laughed, the first time he had seen her do that. She did it in silence, save for a faint hiss of breath. The stylus moved across the tablet again.

  EVEN I CAN BE VAIN. THOUGH NO ONE WOULD BELIEVE IT.

  “What would you have me say?” said Tyrcamber. “Lady Ruari, the silent angel of the hospital tents, the fair woman who brings dying men back from the edge of death.”

  YOU ARE A POET.

  “I’m really not,” said Tyrcamber.

  Ruari hesitated and then wrote again.

  I WAS SCARED OF YOU. NOT ANYMORE. WHEN THE BATTLE IS OVER, I SHOULD TELL YOU.

  “Tell me what?” said Tyrcamber.

  THE TRUTH ABOUT ME. HOW I GAINED POWER.

  “You said you gained it in pain as well,” said Tyrcamber.

  Ruari nodded and wrote some more.

  WHEN I HAVE THE WORDS, I WILL TELL YOU.

  He wondered what that meant.

  Instead of saying more, she put the tablet and stylus back in their pouch, wormed under his left arm, and rested her head against his chest. That felt nice. That felt very nice. Part of his mind pointed out that if she wasn’t afraid of him, perhaps they ought to find a bed or at least a blanket somewhere. But he was so damned tired. All he wanted was to sleep, maybe after drinking an entire skin of wine.

  And he felt…better, as if telling Ruari what had happened to him had lightened the shadows of his heart.

  Ruari fell asleep sitting against him, and Tyrcamber soon after.

  The next morning, they rejoined the army as it continued the march southwest, leaving Grundorf cured of the withering plague.

  ***

  Chapter 15: We Shall Be As Gods

  Cyprian closed the bedroom door behind him and walked to his sideboard, intending to have a cup of whiskey before sleep. He had been drinking too much lately, but the unending tension of the situation was wearing at his nerves.

  He hadn’t even gotten halfway there before someone started pounding at the door.

  It had been another long, miserable day. Another day of standing in the great hall of the Prince’s Palace and watching the wretched Accolon Pendragon undo years of careful work. With the connivance of the damned Sir Owain Redshield (and how Cyprian regretted not killing him years ago!) the Crown Prince had taken control of the Palace’s scribes and records. Accolon was methodically working his way through years’ worth of enclosures, reversing them one by one by royal decree.

  And Cyprian could not do a damned thing about it. By both the law and tradition of Andomhaim, Accolon was acting well within his rights. None of the nobles of the other duxarchates would protest, and indeed, would be glad to see the proud Cintarran nobles and the upstart bankers humbled. The Regency Council’s support among the Cintarran nobility had collapsed. Caelmark Arban had always commanded sizable support among the nobles, and his supporters had refused to enclose their lands for sheep. That faction had rallied to support Accolon, and more and more nobles joined them. Some of the knights and Comites, sensing the direction of the wind, had renounced their enclosures before Accolon could get around to undoing them, claiming that they had seen the error of their ways and the harm their (well-intentioned, of course) efforts to improve their lands had brought to the realm of Andomhaim. No one believed them, of course, but Accolon was politic enough to accept their claims with a straight face, so long as they behaved.

  Damned cowards, the lot of them.

  It would not be too much longer, Cyprian knew, before one of the Drakocenti panicked and told Accolon everything.

  If that happened, Cyprian wondered if Aeliana or the Theophract would kill him before Accolon got around to it.

  The Crown Prince had not yet formally dissolved the Regency Council, but Cyprian knew it was coming. All it would take was someone finding a scrap of evidence against the Drakocenti. The Shield Knight and the Keeper had been absent from the court, and Cyprian’s spies told him that neither Lady Third nor Lady Selene had been seen coming or going from Queen Mara’s castra outside the city. They were looking for something, probably proof against Cyprian, and the thought of fighting someone like the Shield Knight or the Keeper made sweat bead on Cyprian’s forehead.

  After all that, he needed a drink. God, he deserved a drink.

  But someone kept pounding on his bedroom door.

  “What?” he bellowed. He wasn’t foolish enough to simply open it. Cyprian didn’t think that Aeliana would bother with games to kill him, but he wasn’t going to take the chance.

  “It is Jacob, Master!” came the familiar voice. “I have urgent news!”

  Jacob? He would know better than to disturb Cyprian for anything unimportant.

  Cyprian crossed the door and threw it open, wondering what new catastrophe had befallen. His usual guards stood outside, but Jacob stood between them. The hulking captain all but quivered with excitement.

  He did not look like a man about to deliver bad news.

  “Yes?” said Cyprian.

  “Master Cyprian,” said Jacob, and he grinned, showing uneven yellow teeth. “They have found it, sir. They’ve found it!”

  A crushing wave of relief rolled through Cyprian, followed by surging exultation. They had done it! Despite all the obstacles, despite all the setbacks and the failures, his men had found the Great Eye at last!

  Sober assessment followed the triumph. They had found the Great Eye, true, but that was only the first step. Cyprian and the Drakocenti still had to open it and claim its power, and his enemies were closing around him.

  “Show me,” said Cyprian. “Quickly.” He pointed as his guards. “You two, with me.” He looked at Jacob. “Which way?”

  “We can use the entrance in the cellars of the Bank,” said Jacob, striding through the wood-paneled hallway to the domus’s main stairs. “As it turns out, a section of the old dvargir ruins opens into a stair that leads directly to the chamber holding the
Great Eye. One of the crews stumbled across it by chance, and once they realized what they had found, they came directly to me.”

  “Good,” said Cyprian. “Good, we must act at once. Hasten!”

  They hurried down the stairs and into the entry hall of the domus, and Cyprian came to an abrupt halt, his boots skidding against the mosaic floor. A cloaked and hooded woman stood by the doors, one hand resting on the hilt of her sword. For a terrible instant, Cyprian thought Aeliana had come to kill him. But why? He had found the Great Eye as commanded!

  Then his overexcited mind worked it out.

  “You have heard the news?” he said. No doubt Aeliana had made a point of keeping watch over his men.

  “Aye,” said Aeliana. “I wish to see it for myself. Lead on.”

  There was no point in trying to refuse her. “I shall be delighted to have you accompany me, Herald.” Aeliana’s lips twitched in amusement. “Captain?”

  “This way, Master,” said Jacob.

  Cyprian, Aeliana, Jacob and the two guards descended into the vaults of the Scepter Bank. The cellars had been converted into individual vaults, small brick cells sealed off by steel doors, where individual merchants and nobles stored their treasures. Though Cyprian had long ago stolen many of those treasures to fund his efforts to bring Cintarra to chaos and find the Great Eye. At the northern end of the vaults was a massive steel door, locked and barred, and the door opened into a spiral stair that descended to the Shadow Ways. Jacob and the guards opened it, and they took the stairs.

  Walking through the Shadow Ways was always a dangerous experience, but Cyprian had three armed men with him, and he suspected Aeliana had powers and abilities that she had not yet used in front of him. Plus, when pushed, he could use his own Mark of the Drakocenti to summon power, though he wished to avoid that if possible. Best to not to draw the notice of the Keeper of Andomhaim or the Magistri.