Dragon Thief

by S. Andrew Swann

  “You planned this,” I said when I could find my voice again.

  “Oh, far from it.” He chuckled with a sound like someone sprinkling tiny splinters of broken glass into my ears. “You earned that token. But it is only what it is. Your own snarled fate led you here.”

  “So you’re here to gloat?”

  “No, Frank. The rituals to consecrate sacrifices in my name brought you all into my presence.”

  “‘You all?’”

  He gestured and I saw we weren’t alone. I saw a huddled form and involuntarily snapped, “What are you doing to her?”

  “Nothing, Frank. They are not yet mine. What they bring here now, as with you, is solely their own.”

  I ran to the cowering body. It was Rabbit. She seemed smaller and less gaunt, but I recognized her face as she huddled shivering against the cobblestones. I bent down and touched her bare shoulder and she winced.

  “Daddy, please, no,” she whispered, and the sound of her voice was so unexpected that I jerked my hand away.

  “Rabbit?”

  “Please,” she sobbed. “No.”

  “She may be here.” Nâtlac’s voice burrowed into my ears. “But what she sees is what she brought with her. Your privileged history with me allows you to see partly through the veil.”

  “But she’s a mute,” I said.

  “And what are you?”

  I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. If I strode here in my original body, a body that had been worm food for months, of course poor Rabbit could regain her tongue. But, as I watched her cower, naked, from her invisible father, I couldn’t think the return of her speech was worth it.

  Several steps away Laya sat on the ground, legs crossed. She appeared mostly as I remembered, except for the blood covering her hands and arms, and the scar on her face was a fresh wound. “Laya? Are you all right?”

  She didn’t respond. She stared glassy-eyed into a pile of shiny entrails heaped in her lap.

  Even though I knew what I saw was some sort of illusion, I shouted, “Laya?” afraid that she’d been disemboweled.

  She hadn’t.

  I saw, though she was about the same age as the Laya I knew, she was much more gaunt—starvation-thin, showing the edges of her skull and the knobs on her wrist as she slowly brought a bloody flap of meat from the pile on her lap up to her lips. I turned away as she opened a ghoulish mouth of red-stained teeth and began to chew.

  My own nightmares are sort of tame, I thought.

  “Hello, have you seen my daddy?” I spun around and saw a small boy, maybe about five years old, dressed in crusty rags. His face was smeared with filth except where tears had washed stripes of white against the skin.

  “I lost my daddy.”

  The boy didn’t wait for an answer. He turned away from me and wandered off, asking the darkness, “Have you seen my daddy? Where’s my daddy?”

  It took me a moment before I realized I was watching a much younger Krys. “She’s been homeless since she was six and the Delmark watch took her dad to the dungeons.” I watched her disappear into the darkness.

  “Why put them through this?”

  His laugh sliced through my skull. “Suffering needs no reason. It just is. I find it admirable.”

  “Admirable?”

  “Each soul is unique in its particular pain. There is beauty in it.”

  A baby cried in the darkness and I ran toward it. When I came upon her, the tiny body was blue, cold, and stiff. I recognized the strawberry-blond curls plastered against her scalp. “Thea?”

  “I turn away no offerings. And children can bear so much more before they’re broken.”

  I placed a hand on the cold body, and it sucked in a breath and began screaming bloody murder again. The skin was suddenly warm and pink. “What?”

  “You’re walking through their dreams, their fears, their pain. They honor you by presenting their wounds.”

  I didn’t feel honored.

  I glanced up as I touched the infant Thea and I could see another scene dimly through the low red light, woods that seemed familiar. “But . . . they said she was abandoned in the woods . . . she would have been nine or ten.”

  “The little one was abandoned long before her family left her in the woods.”

  The baby stopped crying. The skin had gone cold again.

  I shook my head. “I don’t want to see any more.”

  “Yes,” Nâtlac said, his words burrowing into my brain like a thousand hungry beetles. “You do.”

  I turned to look at the Dark Lord, and his smile was a knife slash across my eyes. I looked away, and baby Thea was gone, replaced by Mary, equally naked. She lay on her back, staring upward, not seeing me. Her body was roped with bruises, and blood stained her legs.

  “No,” I said, closing my eyes. “I don’t want to see this.”

  I started getting to my feet, and something grabbed my wrist. My eyes shot open and I was looking directly into Mary’s staring eyes. Nâtlac’s realm was gone, replaced by a shabby room with a bed and a few sticks of furniture. Mary stared into my eyes, but somehow I also saw the scene from outside myself as well. I wasn’t myself or Snake, I was someone else with shaggy gray hair growing everywhere but my scalp. Mary had sprung from the bed and had grabbed my/his wrist.

  “You like it rough?” she whispered.

  I/he tried to pull my/his arm away, and Mary’s other hand came down, clawing at my/his eyes. My own eyes burned as I watched the stranger scream and cover his bloody face. He tried to block her, but she leaped on him. Despite the fact she was little more than half his size, he was slow and blinded and wasn’t able to block it as she sank her teeth into the side of his face, coming away with pieces of his ear and cheek.

  He threw her off of him and stumbled for the door.

  That just gave her the chance to find a weapon.

  He collapsed to his knees as a chair splintered across his back. He tried to get up and a splintered chair leg stabbed into the soft part of his back above the right kidney.

  He bellowed, and Mary spat at him. “Rough? You like it rough?”

  She pulled the chair leg out and stabbed him with it again, and again, and a third time before the wood broke off in the wound. I watched as she kept beating him, venting years of rage and anger in a few minutes. When it was done, she was as bloody as the corpse smeared on the ground, and most of the blood wasn’t hers.

  I backed away at the same time I realized I could back away.

  Nâtlac’s realm reasserted itself, and it was almost a relief.

  Part of me wondered what was different about that guy, how awful he must have been to trigger that response. Another part of me knew that the only thing that marked him from any of the others the White Rock Thieves’ Guild had given Mary to was the fact he was the last one.

  I already felt a few qualms about how I had spent the first night in Snake’s body. Now those qualms had blossomed into a full-blown self-loathing. Sure, I had assumed that I had been dealing with a willing businesswoman, but did I know? When I’d had to deal with a guild in the past, I know quite a number of my jobs had been less than voluntary . . .

  Of all the times before, when I’d paid for my companionship, how many times had it been coerced?

  And why had I waited until now to care?

  “That’s enough,” I whispered.

  “No, there are two more.”

  Mary disappeared, and I asked, “Two more?”

  “No, I didn’t mean this . . .” I turned toward the new voice, and saw Grace, Fearless Leader, on her knees, shaking her head. Unlike the others, her appearance in the world of nightmares hadn’t changed. Body and clothing were pretty much as I had last seen her.

  But her attitude . . .

  Grace seemed to have collapsed inside herself. I had seen some stress fractures
in her commanding demeanor here and there as she struggled to keep rein on her little band. What I saw now was a complete collapse of the mask she wore. She shook as she wept uncontrollably.

  I walked up to her, and she seemed tiny and much younger, kneeling on the ground. I reached out and touched her shoulder—

  —she peered in through a window at a quartet of black-clad thugs. A woman was obviously dead at their feet, a pool of blood spreading beneath her. They held another man down on his knees, knife to his throat. One of the thugs asked, “Where’s the brat you been givin’ our secrets to?”

  Another chimed in. “Give her up, we may just hurt you some.”

  Next to me, Grace whispered, “Father, don’t.”

  The man on his knees moved only his eyes to look directly at us. He may have smiled slightly before he raised his head and spat in the face of the lead thug.

  They slit his throat without any ceremony.

  Grace gasped as his body fell face first onto the floor next to his wife. I squeezed her shoulder, but I wasn’t really part of this vision, and she ignored me. She shook her head, sucking in breathless sobs and saying near silent words.

  “Not . . . my . . . fault . . .”

  Then her breath caught. I saw her eyes widen and the color drain from her face, and I turned to look at what new horror she was seeing.

  “Oh no, Grace,” I whispered, “don’t do this to yourself.”

  The window was gone, and we faced a blasted plain under a moonless night sky. Five bodies were strewn in the mud, bodies broken, sightless eyes staring at the endless blackness above us. Mary, Laya, Krys, Rabbit, Thea . . .

  “This hasn’t happened,” I told her.

  But I wasn’t there, and she just kept shaking her head. “Not my fault.”

  I let go of her shoulder. “She shouldn’t have to bear that weight.”

  “It is her weight to bear, Frank.” I winced at the Dark Lord’s voice.

  “Why are you showing me this?”

  “I am not showing you anything. These are their secrets to reveal.”

  I got slowly to my feet.

  “One more, Frank.”

  “That was all the girls. There’s no one left.”

  “No. There is one more sacrifice. Someone you want to meet.”

  “Who?” I said, even as a shadow coalesced out of the darkness, forming into an armored figure kneeling in supplication. The plate mail shone despite the dark ruddy light, the cascade of blond hair only slightly less so.

  For several moments I stared, unbelieving.

  “You must be kidding.”

  Unlike the others, this apparition heard me.

  Sir Forsythe the Good turned to face me and smiled. “My Liege! The Dark Lord has truly answered my prayers.”

  CHAPTER 14

  My first thought on seeing Sir Forsythe was that it was time for me to undergo my own trial by nightmare. That was only slightly unfair to him, since while he had pledged fealty to me, that was only after trying to kill me a few times. It was hard to completely trust anyone who had managed to somehow reconcile maiden-saving and monster-slaying with the worship of the Dark Lord Nâtlac. It was a bizarre bit of mental legerdemain that, frankly, made him look as crazy as a rabid goblin drunk on fermented mushrooms.

  But he was also one of the few people around who knew me as I originally appeared, pre-princess.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “A final devotion before the usurper offers me to the Dark Lord.” He shook his head sadly. “I had always expected my end would be on the battlefield fighting the forces of darkness.”

  You are the forces of darkness.

  “No, why are you in Grünwald?”

  “To find you, My Liege.”

  “What? How?” I had a brief surge of optimism that they had figured out what had happened.

  “When you disappeared, suspicion immediately fell to your main rival for the Dark One’s favor.”

  “When I . . . disappeared?” Something about the way Sir Forsythe spoke suggested something else was going on.

  “The Dragon Prince was inconsolable when you were abducted from your chambers. Without a ransom demand there was no evidence of who took you and where.”

  The coward just ran away, great.

  “Of your retainers, I am the one who knows the most of the secret ways through Grünwald, and the passages to enter their keep unseen. It was my sacred duty to find proof that Grünwald was behind your disappearance.”

  “That doesn’t seem to have worked very well.”

  “I was betrayed, My Liege,” he said. “I had barely slipped across the border and King Dudley’s soldiers were waiting for me. I battled valiantly, but there were too many. I was overwhelmed.”

  I didn’t say anything, but I suspected that his capture had less to do with any betrayal than it did with the fact that it was implausible that Sir Forsythe could sneak anywhere. The man was normally as subtle as a brick to the face.

  “But I see that the Dragon Prince’s suspicions have been vindicated. You are here—”

  “Not exactly. Dudley doesn’t even know he has me prisoner.”

  “My Liege?”

  “You served Grünwald for a long time. I suppose you are familiar with the Bastard Prince Bartholomew?”

  “Of course, a horrid man, exiled and driven to be a petty outlaw.” Sir Forsythe shook his head. “Forgive me, My Liege, but what does Prince Bartholomew have to do with what is happening?”

  “Everything, unfortunately.”

  • • •

  It felt like hours later when I opened my eyes and found myself back on the cot in the dungeon cell that Dudley had left me in. However, from what I had experienced before in the Dark Lord’s realm, I knew that it had only been a few minutes.

  I took a few breaths to help the sense of disorientation pass. Being in Nâtlac’s presence too long left a feeling like sharp gravel abrading the inside of my brain. I rubbed my temples, remembering that at some point I had heard the Dark Lord mentioning something suggesting that what his mother lacked in ambition, King Dudley made up for in stupidity.

  I found it impossible to fault the sentiment.

  King Dudley apparently hadn’t known, thought of, or cared about the fact that the mass consecration in Nâtlac’s presence would give the offerings a chance to communicate. Of course, most victims would be paralyzed by the inherent wrongness of the Dark Lord’s presence and escape into their own nightmares like the girls had.

  However, Sir Forsythe was an acolyte of Nâtlac, and the Dark Lord had actually crashed my wedding. We were both about as used to it as you could be. Even if I had been the Bastard Prince Bartholomew, Dudley expected his half brother to be familiar enough with the family religion to bring six girls into Grünwald specifically to sacrifice them.

  Even if King Dudley the Dim thought it didn’t matter because we were all locked up in the dungeons, it was a stupid risk.

  Especially since it did matter.

  Sir Forsythe was here specifically because he was aware of just about every secret passage in this keep. There were very few in the dungeons, which was why he was still chained in a hole. But, given the fratricidal history of the Grünwald royal family, it didn’t take a genius to realize that if there was going to be a secret passage in the dungeons, it would be installed in the so-called “King’s Suite,” and that the king who installed it might have been less than forthcoming about its existence to his immediate family.

  It was just too bad for King Dudley’s father that the queen had him assassinated rather than imprisoned. Then again, one man’s ironic regicide is another’s escape hatch.

  • • •

  It took me a bit of searching to find the false stone in the base of the wall and pry it free. Beyond was an unlit tunnel, dark as the Lord Nâtlac’s soul
. I grabbed the oil lamp from the table and shone it into the hole. Beyond the wall, the hole opened up into a narrow corridor that snaked between this cell and the next. The space was rough and unfinished and barely wide enough to accommodate me in my current incarnation. I crawled and wedged myself in.

  Even with a bustline, I would have fit better as a princess.

  There were handles on the inner side of the false stone, but I only made a token effort to pull it shut behind myself. Tight as the space was, I couldn’t bend myself to get the leverage to grab it, and there were other things higher on my priority list.

  I crept along, sandwiched between two stone walls, holding the lamp in front of me. It felt like hours. Then I came to the end.

  I stared ahead of me. Several feet in front of the lamp, the void between the walls was filled top to bottom with loose stone and gravel. I suspected that was how the walls were naturally constructed, two stone surfaces with a void filled with debris. It certainly would make it harder to dig out, and it made the “secret” passage easy to hide, since the wall with the passage wouldn’t be any thicker than any other wall.

  That was a point in the designer’s favor.

  However, that was outweighed by the complete absence of any obvious exit. I stood there, dumbfounded, wondering if some sort of cave-in had blocked my escape. That seemed unlikely, since the debris blocking my escape was packed too flat and evenly to have happened by accident.

  Did Dudley discover the passage and block it off?

  Then why block it off here and not back at the cell itself? It seemed a lot of trouble to go to just to have a laugh at my expense.

  The flame from the oil lamp flickered, and I realized that I felt a slight draft on my face.

  “What?” I whispered.

  I did my best, one-handed, to shutter the lamp. I fumbled with it and it slipped out of my hand. It clattered on the floor and guttered out, plunging me into almost complete darkness.