The Dragon Society (Obsidian Chronicles Book 2)

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  "Will he, indeed?" Arlian had a fairly strong suspicion that Lord Wither's courtesy and consideration was not entirely unselfish. The old man probably thought that a polite approach was more likely to be effective in cozening Arlian. Arlian also had a fairly strong suspicion that he knew what Lord Wither wanted, and that he was not going to get it.

  "Thank you for your help, Horn," Arlian said, "and my thanks to Lord Wither for his intervention. Tell him I will be happy to see him in a few days."

  Horn bowed.

  "Can we go now?" Black asked, gesturing at the wagon.

  Horn stepped aside. Arlian retrieved his fallen hat, then hurried to the driver's bench. A moment later he and Black were back in their seats, the arrow embedded in the back of the bench between them had been pulled free and tossed aside, and the oxen were trudging onward as if nothing had happened.

  The wagon rolled slowly up the streets of Manfort, toward Arlian's home in the Upper City. "I told you we should have stayed at an inn tonight," Black said. "I don't think he would have attacked us if we had arrived by daylight, with people everywhere."

  "Oh, I think he would," Arlian said. "He could have lost himself in the crowds and escaped."

  Black clearly didn't believe this, but did not actually say so. Arlian glanced at him, then said, "We had to come through the gate sometime, and I thought our chances were better late at night I may have erred."

  "I think you just didn't want to wait any longer than necessary to get home," Black replied. "Not even a few hours."

  "That's part of it," Arlian admitted. "After all, Hasty's child is due at any time, if it hasn't come already. But also, I have a reputation to keep up as Lord Obsidian." He caught himself on the edge of the seat as the wagon bumped over a loose paving stone.

  "Which do you think is a better entrance—riding in openly at midday, dirty and tired, in a cheap old trader's wagon, or simply reappearing without warning, back in place at the Old Palace?"

  "Why do you still care what anyone thinks?" Black demanded, throwing his companion an angry glance.

  "Enziet and Drisheen and the others are dead, and Nail and Belly know you for who you are. Who are you trying to impress?"

  "Everyone I can. If I intend to hunt down and kill the dragons that destroyed my village, I'm going to need help. I can't do it alone."

  Black glanced at him, and saw that his companion's expression was intent, although he was staring into empty darkness. Clearly, Arlian was seeing something other than the street ahead of them, and Black suspected it had something to do with dragons. "You probably can't do it at all, Ari," he said gently.

  "I have to try."

  Black's manner turned harsher. "And just who do you think could possibly help? Lord Wither? He seems to be eager enough to help you as it is, at least against Drisheen's assassins, but what could he do against a dragon? Who are you trying to impress?"

  "The Duke of Manfort, for one," Arlian replied.

  "His ancestors led humanity in the wars against the dragons, seven hundred years ago. He might welcome a chance to continue the job."

  Black grimaced. "He's more likely to hang you. After all, you hunted down and killed his chief adviser. If he's sufficiently annoyed about that I don't think it will matter whether he finds you in your palace or in the gutter. It's lucky for you that he probably doesn't have the wits to find anything but wine, food, and women without an adviser telling him where to look—and un-lucky for your plans that I don't think he has the nerve to do anything about the dragons."

  Arlian shrugged. "If his advisers urge him on, who knows what he might do?"

  "Arlian, why would his advisers urge him to do anything as insane as hunting dragons? The only one mad enough to even consider it is sitting beside me on this wagon."

  Arlian did not argue with that; instead he asked,

  "Who are the Duke's advisers now? The names I knew were Lord Enziet, Lord Drisheen, Lord Hardior, and Lady Rime."

  "Well, you've just named the four best known."

  Arlian smiled wryly. "And it would seem I've killed two of them."

  "So you did," Black acknowledged. "And I believe Lord Hardior fell out of favor last year. That leaves Lady Rime."

  "Who sleeps behind us," Arlian said. He glanced over his shoulder at the interior of the wagon. "I'm amazed she didn't wake during our little encounter at the gate."

  "She might well have awakened and had the sense to stay quiet."

  "So she might," Arlian agreed. He glanced back into the wagon again, but could not make out any of the passengers—the lantern was positioned so that its light did not penetrate far into the interior.

  "At any rate, Lady Rime was not here to maintain her position or claim Enziet's," Black said, "and somehow I doubt that void went unfilled. There is undoubtedly some sweet-tongued scoundrel who has wormed his way into the Duke's favor in our absence—Lord Hardior, reclaiming his position, or perhaps some other courtier."

  "And we don't know who that might be, nor whether he's kindly disposed toward us, so wouldn't you say it would be best to impress him?"

  "Oh, I suppose so," Black muttered.

  "One might expect that whoever it is would be grateful to us for removing Enziet and Drisheen and creating an opportunity for advancement in the Duke's favor," Arlian suggested hopefully.

  "Gratitude is a virtue that is expected more than practiced," Black remarked dryly.

  "I've noticed that," Arlian admitted. He looked around at the deserted streets.

  Here and there a torch or lantern cast an orange glow across the gray stone walls and stone-paved streets of Manfort, or the mounds of dirty, melting snow, but for the most part the city was dark. There was no sign of any further ambush, nor any sign of Horn or Lord Wither's other men—but then, why should there be? Drisheen had left the city hurriedly, and had little time to prepare; furthermore, like ail members of the Dragon Society, he had been sworn not to seriously harm another member within the city walls. He had probably only had time to commission the one pair of assassins, and would not have arranged an attack to take place within the city—he had surely expected to return, and to take up his place once more in the Society, so he would not have broken his oath so openly.

  And Lord Wither would know that.

  Arlian, Wither, Drisheen, Enziet—they were all members of the Dragon Society, all dragonhearts.

  Each of them had survived an encounter with a dragon. Each had at some point swallowed a mixture of human blood and dragon venom, and had been transformed thereby. Long ago a few dragonhearts—

  Enziet, Wither, and the long-dead Rehirian—had founded the Society with the stated purpose of opposing the dragons however they might, of avenging the attacks they had survived, the attacks that had slain their friends and families. For centimes, every known dragonheart in the Lands of Man had eventually joined And thos

  the Society.e dragonhearts were no longer entirely human.

  Dragonhearts did not age. They were immune to poisons and disease. They all had, to varying degrees, a supernatural vigor—dragonhearts were a shade stronger and faster than ordinary men, and did not tire as easily. They possessed an unnatural charisma, so that all of them, over the centuries of life the elixir granted them, were able to become wealthy and powerful. Every member of the Society, no matter how lowly born, was now a lord or lady, as the terms were used in the Lands of Man—owners of profitable businesses, with multiple employees they did not oversee directly.

  Those were the positive effects of the heart of the dragon. The less pleasant consequences included sterility, toxic blood—and other things, secrets that most of them did not yet know. Further, dragonhearts tended to grow cold and detached from normal society over the years, and had therefore banded together in their own secret society—though even there, their re-lationships were often less than cordial.

  Arlian, for example, had vowed to kill five of his fellow members, as well as various other people, in vengeance for certain crimes. He had dealt w
ith three of those five—Horim, Drisheen, and Enziet.

  Drisheen, it seemed, had attempted to return the favor. That left Lord Stiam, known as Nail, and Lord Toribor, also called Belly, at least nominally Arlian's sworn foes—but he was certain that neither of them would try to kill him inside the walls, either directly or through hirelings. They took their oaths seriously.

  So he was safe, for the moment, and had only to get home to the Old Palace. He peered around in the darkness, trying to recognize where he was. After an absence of more than four months Arlian was not entirely certain he could have found his own way to his estate by night; he had lived in Manfort only briefly.

  Black, though, seemed to know every twist and turn of the route. He guided the oxen unhesitatingly up the slope toward the Upper City. It occurred to Arlian that he didn't know whether Black was a native of Manfort, or whether he had come from somewhere else originally. Black was not particularly prone to talk about his own past, beyond a few amusing anecdotes he would sometimes retail when drunk.

  Arlian respected that. After all, his own history was not something he wanted widely known. He had told Black and Rime and a few others the entire story, and much of it had been revealed during his initiation into the Dragon Society, but to most of the population of Manfort Lord Obsidian was a figure of mystery, his background unknown.

  And since he was an escaped slave, that was a very good thing. Arlian doubted that a runaway mine slave who had stolen and adventured his way into a fortune would get the same respect as someone whose background was entirely unknown.

  He had not been born a slave; he had been born Arlian of the Smoking Mountain, a free citizen in the mining village known to outsiders as Obsidian. The natives had never bothered with a name among themselves, since there was only the one village on the Smoking Mountain; Arlian had not known that anyone called it Obsidian until long after the place was destroyed.

  He had been a boy of eleven when three dragons swooped down from the overcast sky of a sweltering summer day and burned the village to the ground. He had survived in his family's cellar, where he had been trapped beneath his grandfather's corpse—and where he had swallowed a mixture of his grandfather's blood and a dragon's venom.

  It was in the aftermath of that destruction that Arlian had been captured by looters and sold into slavery. He had spent seven years in the mines of Deep Delving before an overseer, grateful that Arlian had saved his life, had helped the young man escape.

  Arlian had not dared to use his real name for a time after his escape, and had gone through several other names before finally arriving in Manfort, wealthy from adventures in Westguard and the magic-haunted south, and adopting the identity of Lord Obsidian.

  As a boy he had sworn to avenge his home's destruction, and his own enslavement. He had later also sworn to avenge the murder of friends in Westguard, and the abuses suffered by the slaves kept in the brothel there known as the House of Carnal Society and the House of the Six Lords.

  A sadistic overseer from the mines in Deep Delving, a young man known as Lampspiller, was also on Arlian's list of people who deserved punishment for their crimes, but he was only a minor concern.

  Arlian had made a good start on fulfilling those oaths of vengeance. Most of the looters were dead; the last two, Dagger and Tooth, had long since vanished from Manfort and were perhaps dead as well.

  Of the six lords who had been behind the atrocities in Westguard, Arlian had rid the world of four—three dragonhearts, and Lord Kuruvan.

  The other two were the least of the lot—Nail had gone so far as to apologize for his actions and turn over the two women he had still held as household slaves, and Arlian had fought and wounded Toribor once already, almost three months ago, in a nighttime duel in the streets of a town called Cork Tree. Toribor's pair of maimed slaves. Cricket and Brook, were now safely in the back of Arlian's wagon, with Lady Rime and two Aritheian magicians, and pursuing their former master did not seem especially urgent. As he had told the assassin, Arlian had had his fill of vengeance, at least for now, and at least against men and women.

  But then there were the dragons—not merely the three who had burned Obsidian and slaughtered Arlian's family, but all the dragons that still lived deep beneath the earth, and ventured forth to kill and burn when the whim struck them. Arlian wanted them all dead.

  No man, it was said, had ever slain a dragon, in all of human history—not in the old days when the dragons ruled the world, nor in modern times when the dragons had retired to their caverns and left humanity to mind its own affairs.

  So it was said—but it wasn't true.

  Arlian had killed a dragon.

  Admittedly it had been only a newborn dragon, a mere infant, and even so he had almost died fighting it, but he had killed a dragon.

  Save for the venom scar on his face, his injuries from that battle were healed now—or at least, the injuries to his flesh; he was not sure just how much damage had been done to his spirit. He had learned things in that conflict that troubled him deeply.

  He had also learned secrets that he thought might enable him to someday slay the dragons that had destroyed his home and family, as he had slain the infant—secrets that might eventually allow the complete extermination of dragons—but there were complications, very severe complications.

  Arlian wanted to think everything out very carefully before continuing his quest for vengeance—and he definitely intended to continue.

  He could do that thinking anywhere, but he preferred to do it in Manfort, heart of the Lands of Man, in his home the Old Palace, a rambling monstrosity that the current Duke of Manfort's grandfather had abandoned as too expensive to maintain, but which Lord Obsidian had bought and restored.

  It was in Manfort that Lord Toribor and Lord Nail lived. It was in Manfort that Lord Enziet had served as chief adviser to the Duke. It was in Manfort that the Dragon Society, the sorcerous secret masters of the Lands of Man, met—and it was inside Manfort's walls that the members were sworn not to kill one another. If Arlian stayed elsewhere, his enemies in the Society could send assassins after him, but here, they could not.

  It was in Manfort that his potential allies dwelt, as well. If he hoped to wipe out the dragons, he would almost certainly need a great deal of assistance, and the Dragon Society—at least, those members, like Lord Wither or Lady Rime, who had no reason to hate or fear him—seemed a likely source for that aid.

  Though there were complications.

  And it was in Manfort that he had a household awaiting him—his hired servants, and four of the women he had saved from the House of the Six Lords.

  He held no slaves, of course; after his years in the mines Arlian could hardly allow slavery in his own home. His four guests had been brothel slaves for years, their feet amputated to prevent any attempt at flight, but he had freed them.

  He had freed those four—but it should have been more. Arlian's gut knotted at the memory of poor Sweet, who had died in his arms; of Sweet's friend Dove, whose bones still lay in Lord Enziet's house; and of Sparkle and Ferret, whom Lord Drisheen had hanged out of spite rather than permit Arlian to rescue them.

  There were the two in the wagon, Cricket and Brook, which made six in all, but still, the House of the Six Lords had had sixteen unwilling occupants.

  Arlian had been unable to save ten of them.

  He sat, silently remembering, as the wagon moved slowly up the street, and then dozed briefly and unhappily, the faces of dead women drifting through fragmented dreams.

  He jerked awake again as the wagon bumped across a gutter as it crossed an intersection. He glimpsed the familiar outline of the Old Palace ahead, a black shape barely distinguishable from the black night sky behind it. The windows were dark, and no lantern hung at the gate or in the forecourt.

  "We're almost there," he remarked.

  "Almost," Black agreed.

  "I hope someone's awake to admit us."

  "I have the keys," Black said.

  Arlian
nodded. He should have expected as much, he told himself; Black was always prepared. A man of great foresight; Arlian knew he had been very lucky to stumble into such a companion, and even luckier that Black had stayed with him for so long.

  Oh, he paid Black a generous salary, and Black was moderately susceptible to the superhuman charisma of anyone possessing the heart of the dragon, but there was no question that Black had the willpower and common sense to leave if he chose.

  That he did not so choose flattered Arlian immensely. He wondered sometimes whether he deserved such an honor.

  "I think the postern would be appropriate," Black suggested, breaking into Arlian's thoughts. "Given the hour."

  "Of course," Arlian agreed—though if he had been driving in his current weary state he would have taken the wagon directly to the front gate without thinking about it.

  Black clucked and pulled at the reins, and the oxen turned in to the alley, bound for the kitchen entrance.

  A moment later the wagon creaked to a stop, and Black leapt to the ground. "You wake the others," he said. "I'll unlock the doors and see if there's a fire."

  Arlian, who had been poised to jump down after his steward, caught himself. "Of course," he said. He turned and ducked down into the body of the wagon, dodging the arrow that still stood in the floorboards.

  The Arithean magicians were curled up on one side, Lady Rime on the other; at the back, sleeping on cushions atop the luggage, were Cricket and Brook.

  There was no sense in waking the younger women until someone was available to carry them; Arlian turned to the magicians, Thirif and Shibiel, first. He shook Thirif's shoulder gently. The Arithean stirred and sat up, then awakened his companion while Arlian turned his attention to Lady Rime. Rime came awake instantly and stared up at him.

  "We're at the Old Palace," he told her. "You're welcome to stay as long as you like, or we can take you to your own home once we have the others safely inside."

  Rime shot a glance at the sleeping women, and another at the magicians. "I'll stay here tonight," she said.