The Dragon Lord

by Peter Morwood

And an air of expectation.

  As the short evening of late autumn drew night’s cloak around it, a star brightened in the northern sky where no star should have been. As it brightened it moved, until this star that was no star swept across the heavens in a glare of light that threw hard-edged black shadows behind wave-crests and fire-scoured rocks alike. If any mariners had been insane enough to anchor in the island’s bay, they would have seen the not-star descend in a great parabola, dragging a tail of silver flame in its wake for all the world like a blazing missile shot from an impossibly huge catapult. They would have seen it plunge with unerring accuracy into the crater. And they would have heard…

  Nothing.

  The silence was absolute, so solid it could almost be touched, as if made of heavy fabric. In the course of that long silence the true stars began to glitter in the void, a scattering of splintered diamonds strewn broadcast on a mantle of black velvet.

  Ymareth the firedrake reared from the throat of the hollow mountain with a whisper of iron scales and the single hard, bright clank of a talon striking stone. Wings blacker than the night unfurled in the trembling air, a huge, leisurely stretching which could never be indulged in the confines of the cavern far below. The firedrake’s head curved up and back on its great sinuous neck, between the canopy of the wings, and was still.

  Ymareth waited for the dawn.

  *

  The shudder came from nowhere and from everywhere, a single jolt violent enough to bring Aldric’s teeth together with a click.

  His eyes opened very wide, and had he been able to glimpse their pupils in a mirror he would have seen the drug-shrunken pinpricks dilate to huge black discs set fair to swallow all the flint-grey colour of the surrounding irises. But he didn’t need to see, for he could feel, and it was a feeling he knew already. Then it had been caused by his own nightmares, dreams strong enough to shock him from his own determined drunkenness. But this sudden surge of heat in the marrow of his bones was stronger still.

  And he didn’t even know the reason why.

  But one thing he did know was that despite the sweet fumes of ymeth in his lungs, despite the alcohol coursing through his blood, despite what should have been a heavy lassitude in all his muscles and was instead a tingling urgency, he was in control of his own mind again.

  With that knowledge came the shameful awareness of something he had chosen to ignore, or to blame on other things. It was his own monumental stupidity. He had been duped, he had been dazzled, he had been trapped, and there had never been any excuse for it though he had always found one. His own failings were vices any man – his mind refined it – any honourable man should have ignored, like the pain of wounds or fear in battle. Ignored for the nothing more than pride and private dignity.

  Aldric felt the queasiness of self-reproach bite the back of his throat like dregs of bitter wine as he looked up at the silken cord Kathur had pulled. It was a signal without doubt, but how long ago? Seconds? Minutes? Hours? No, a minute at most, for he could still remember that strange, reluctant softness stealing into the Drusalan woman’s green eyes just as she turned her face away from his. A minute? He flung himself out of the bed and scrabbled for his clothes.

  Kathur rolled over to watch him. At first he thought she had been crying, but those emerald eyes were too hard to weep. Instead her face, that beautiful, imperious, wanton face, wore an expression of regret such as he had seen only once before, when he said, You should leave now, Kyrin-ain. For good or ill, I have places to go where you can’t follow.

  “So you know,” she said, watching Aldric stamp into a boot and fight with its lacings.

  “Yes. I do!” His last word came out on a grunt of effort. “And I should have known it long ago!” The way he moved was close to panic, only barely held in check. When part of his shirt caught on something he took no time to work it free but simply jerked with all his strength, then swore at the quick rending noise that followed. As he tucked the ripped linen into his leather riding-breeches, he turned to look at Kathur.

  “When will they come for me?” It was an idle question and he hadn’t expected an answer, but he got one all the same.

  “At the Hour of the Fox.”

  “How fitting. Your own idea?”

  “No.”

  “That’s…” He converted the clumsy Drusalan timekeeping in his head. “Ten at night. Two hours from now. So how was I to be kept here? By you?” His eyes flicked once again towards the slender signal-cord, and his voice hardened. “Who did you call?”

  “One of my servants.” Kathur paused, but once she had begun the weight of guilty confession drove her into saying more. “Stromin, my bodyguard. You’ve already met him...”

  “Ah.” It was just an exhalation, but it came out past an icy smile which widened by a fraction as Aldric lifted Widowmaker and looped her shoulder-strap over his head. There was a minute click as he twisted the taiken’s safety-collar clear of her scabbard mouth. “Then keep him out of my way. Because I’m leaving, lady. Now.” A final glance about the room confirmed nothing was left behind except the self-respect he would take a long time to fully regain. Aldric turned to go, then glanced back. “Anyway, he’s late. When did you expect him to appear?” The bedroom door opened behind him, and above the sudden frantic alarm inside his head he heard Kathur’s response.

  “Now,” she said.

  Aldric didn’t marvel at that perfect cue. He convulsed sideways at right-angles to the line from his back to the doorway, and he did it with the thickness of his wolfskin vest to spare. Something plucked a puff of black fur from its right shoulder as he wrenched away from the blow, and he heard the swish of parting air as that same something swept down to smash against the floor.

  It was a mace, a fist-sized array of metal flanges on a haft almost as long as his own arm, and Stromin wielded it as easily as a riding-quirt. This bludgeon would crush the steel carapace of an armoured man, and if it struck square against Aldric’s unprotected body it would crack him like an egg. At first that made no sense. Kathur had taken a deal of trouble to hold him for collection, healthy, intact and not even drugged unconscious, though that might only have been for her own entertainment. So why was this hulking servant so set on smearing him across the floor? Jealousy? Or finding his target upright with sword in hand? Never mind wondering why, he was trying to do it and that was enough.

  Aldric dodged another ponderous swing which ploughed through a dressing-table, stinging him with splintered wood and the perfumed shards of cosmetic jars. Long years of training took over and his fingers closed on Widowmaker’s hilt, tugged – then faltered with just a handspan of blade clear of the scabbard.

  Completing that draw would have extended into the Boar’s Strike, a movement so ingrained by constant practice it had become a reflex. Razor-edged steel would have sheared across the servant’s body anywhere from chin to waist. It would have opened him spine-deep and split him asunder in a single splattering instant before he could have dodged, or blocked, or even realised what was happening. It would have solved many problems. Aldric shook his head as if dislodging a cobweb and looked again at Kathur.

  “Call him off, lady!” There was no fear in his voice, nothing prompted by cowardice, but a faint, elusive undertone might have been compassion. “Call him off or he’s dead. Do it! Ikhmur kash-ta!”

  Kathur seemed not to notice his sudden command of Drusalan as she surveyed the tableau of her shattered bedroom. It was all bleak light and shadow now, the bright corridor beyond the open door a harsh contrast to the dim intimacy of the interior. One of the gilded lamps was upset, and the sweetness of its scented oil was another element of this waking nightmare. Still unseen, the Echainon stone went dull. Perhaps it was the distraction of her own damaged possessions, perhaps it was Aldric’s concern with survival rather than honour that changed how she thought of him, perhaps the stone was affected by the actions of a firedrake and a sorcerer in places far away. Once the stone’s light died it was what happened next that
mattered, not why.

  “Commander Voord be damned,” she said. “Kill him.”

  A heartbeat’s worth of utter shock at her order slowed Aldric’s reaction, or maybe the man with the mace had been deliberately, deceptively clumsy in his earlier attacks. When the great iron cudgel lashed out this time, it was far faster than it had ever been before, and Aldric dropped on the spot.

  If he had moved in any direction other than straight down the weapon would have caught and pulped him somewhere along its horizontal arc. Even then he felt a tug at his hair which wasn’t the wind of its passing but the metal haft itself. The mace-head left a long, deep gouge in the wall where he had been standing, and it would have done the same to his chest.

  He came up again with Isileth Widowmaker drawn at last and lips pulled back from his teeth in a snarl of almost animal intensity. That wild scramble across the floor had lifted the pelt of the black wolfskin coyac, and for just an instant its fur bristled across his shoulders as if it was part of him.

  “I don’t know what you did, hlensyarl.” Kathur’s husky voice had gone shrill, and she was glaring at him with something close to hate. “I don’t know what trick you tried to play on me. But it didn’t work. Kill him, Stromin. Kill him now.”

  As he poised to meet another swing of that mace Widowmaker shifted against his hands, and the movement sent a vicious idea flicking through his mind like a dead leaf driven by a gale. It would need just a snap-step right and a quick backhand cut for Kathur’s face to carry a memento of their meeting to the day she died. Aldric stamped the prospect to oblivion. It was unworthy of a kailin-eir, unworthy of a clan-lord, unworthy of a Talvalin. Unworthy of him.

  And you don’t have time or room to chance it, or you would, sneered an unpleasant voice inside his head. It’s as well for her that the moon is just past new. What would you have done if it was full?

  Aldric shivered. Isileth Widowmaker was almost certainly a gortaiken, a hungry sword, one that contrived to be drawn and used in situations better solved by quiet words and common sense. But this new suggestion with its hints about the moon had come from somewhere else. He could guess the source. Evthan the Hunter’s werewolf curse was laid on him for evil amusement, with his wolfskin jacket a mere hunting trophy. But he had worn it at his death, Aldric wore it even now, and sorcery could be both a spreading stain and an infection. All that flicked through his mind in a time measured by his racing pulse, so fast that the big servant Stromin hadn’t moved.

  Aldric moved instead, and in a way nobody expected. From being poised for a killing cut, Widowmaker stabbed down into the wooden floor hard enough that the long blade bent like a bow and sprang back. In the same instant he jerked his taipan shortsword from its scabbard. It wasn’t aimed at Stromin’s neck or even his face but at one thick leg, just above his knee, a precise drawing cut made only by the edge without strength of arm to drive it deep. The keen blade still sliced through muscle like a carving-knife, but at the first jolt against bone Aldric whipped it clear. Isileth would have taken off the leg.

  The big man’s eyes went wide and his mouth opened in a shocked, agonised yell as he fell and his mace fell clattering out of sight. It was a fierce wound, one he would remember for a long time when it ached in damp weather. But it was far away from the great artery of the inner thigh, so he would be alive to remember it and feel it ache.

  Aldric watched until Stromin’s eyes rolled back in his head as consciousness left him, then flicked blood from the taipan and wiped it on a blindly seized garment. He sheathed it, wrenched Isileth Widowmaker free of the floorboards and returned the longsword to its own scabbard. There was no unexpected resistance, even though that ancient and sometimes wilful blade would make no widows tonight.

  He passed one hand across the ruffled fur covering his shoulder, a gesture more like less stroking something alive than settling a disarrayed garment, and thought of how he had wanted to mark Kathur. To hurt her. It was like the memory of actions in a dream, without weight in waking life. There was a place and a time for such behaviour, but it was neither here nor now. The Deepwood of the Jevaiden and Seghar citadel under the Geruath overlords might be long ago and far away. They were neither long nor far enough. With a squirm that was almost a shudder he shrugged free of the coyac and threw it onto the bed.

  “Wolf-fur for the Vixen,” he said and walked from her room without a backward glance.

  Somewhere in the too-quiet house a clock chimed the triple note which marked the turning of another hour. Imperial Drusalan timepieces didn’t ring out numbers, they just drew attention to the named-hour image indicated by their single ornate pointer and Aldric didn’t bother looking. He already knew as much as any Alban ever needed about the clumsy, inexact system. But because he didn’t look, he didn’t see what hour it was. He didn’t find out how much time he had for making his escape.

  Or how little.

  Two hours from now, he had told Kathur. But he had slept a dreamsmoke doze with the sweet smell of ymeth in his lungs and her hands and mouth on his body, and at the instant he spoke the words it had not been two hours but much less than one. From the striking of the clock he had no time at all. Those chimes had signalled the end of the Hour of the Cat.

  And the start of the Hour of the Fox.

  *

  Kathur had a telek spring-gun in her hands, stolen from the Alban’s gear and snatched up from a hiding-place by the bed.

  She uttered no threat or warning as she levelled it at Kourgath’s back, just clenched her teeth and squeezed the trigger-bar. Nothing happened, and by the time she noticed the safety-slide and released it, he had gone. Her head drooped over the useless weapon as two tears fell onto the lustrous wood of its stock like costly jewels, and she stared at their translucence as if she had never seen such things. They weren’t shed for Kourgath and what might have been, or for Stromin bleeding on the floor. Kathur wept from rage, from frustration, and most of all from fear. The distant sound of the harbour gong echoed mournfully in her ears, a one-note song of warning, and she knew she had good cause to be afraid.

  Hautheisart Voord wasn’t known for his tolerance of failure.

  As if her thoughts had power to summon demons, she heard soft feet moving along the corridor. Kathur looked up, saw the flitting of shadows beyond the door and grabbed with one hand for the robe of crimson satin, wishing it was a coat of mail. It had covered her as best she could manage when the first taulath drifted like smoke into her room. In the space of a single breath another joined him, both clad from head to heel in close-fitting charcoal grey that blended with the shadows near the wall.

  A hooded mask covered each man’s head, leaving only their eyes visible, cold eyes like those of night-stalking reptiles, and though they stared at her, they had no interest in the single garment that enhanced far more than it concealed. Their attention was on her right hand, gripping an Alban telek with every appearance of knowing how to use it. The tulathin exchanged significant glances and came no closer. Nor did they say anything though it was plain, despite the masks, that they hadn’t expected to find her alone. The wounded and unconscious man sprawled on the floor didn’t count.

  There were more footfalls, the firm, decisive steps of one who by reason of power and authority didn’t need to move quietly. No-one spoke aloud, but each taulath shifted with disciplined precision to flank the doorway. They paused for a single beat then snapped to attention and executed the rhythmic movements of a full parade salute. The hard smack of fist on chest and thigh sounded like a premonition of Kathur’s future, and only if that future was kind.

  A back-lit silhouette paused in the doorway for dramatic effect before crossing the threshold, and lamplight danced sparkling across the silvered rank-marks of a scarlet helmet as he surveyed the room. The helmet’s deep cheek-guards, nasal and lowering peak masked his features, but Kathur didn’t need to see his face to know who he was.

  “Well, my dear lady,” Hautheisart Voord spoke with a deceptive softness, “where
is he?” Several seconds crawled past before Kathur could swallow enough terror for her acid-soured mouth to form a reply.

  “Gone,” she said. What else was there to say? “He realised he was being kept here.” Then in mitigation, “But it was only minutes ago. I held him until then.” Voord stared at her, eyes unreadable through the jagged shadows filling his helmet, and glanced at the black fur of the coyac jacket at the foot of the bed.

  “ ‘The wolf in the trap is not there as a plaything’,” he quoted. “But you thought you would be clever. Or were you thinking something else?” Another dreadful silence. Then he turned, ignoring her. “Tagen, Garet, is the perimeter secured?”

  “Yes, sir!” The response was simultaneous, like automata.

  “Then go. Both of you. Trawl the nets and bring any catch to Teynaur. Sail at dawn whether I’m there or not. Understood?”

  “Sir!” Kathur watched their departure with sick despair. The troopers were Voord’s honour guard and accompanied him everywhere. They were executors of his will and their dismissal was an insult like a slap in the face. She was no threat. Nobody.

  Nothing.

  *

  The street was dark and silent, swaddled by layers of soft fog as grey as a dove’s wing. A figure emerged from the shadows at the far side and walked with quiet purpose towards the shuttered portico of Kathur’s house, culmination and goal of a long, weary quest. The figure, was cloaked and hooded, nameless, faceless and sexless. But there was the suggestion of a sword’s outline beneath the folds of that heavy cloak, and a faint scrape of metal that was the sound of armour.

  The silent stillness shattered like glass as hooves beat quick and hard on stone, and a man on horseback erupted from the stable entry near the house. Before the hooded figure could do anything except flatten for safety against the nearest wall, the black horse’s rider had slewed his mount around with a metallic slither as its shoes all but lost their grip on the fog-slick cobblestones. Then man and horse were past and away in a swirl of sound and speed.