Dragon Hunters

by Marc Turner

  Thank the Sender she would be far from Dian when the next batch of hapless souls was sent shrieking through Shroud’s Gate by way of a dragon’s maw.

  A tinkle of crystal shook her from her reverie, and she looked back to see Lydanto enter his office. She went inside to join her father. The ambassador helped himself to a glass of an orange-colored liquid from a decanter before stumbling to the chair behind his desk. He sat down heavily. Along the wall behind him was a crack from floor to ceiling that must have been caused by last night’s quake.

  “Apologies for keeping you,” Lydanto said, green-faced. “An upset of the stomach, yes?”

  Agenta said, “Something you ate, no doubt.”

  Lydanto’s chuckle degenerated into a fit of coughing.

  Rethell motioned to her. “Tell him.”

  She recounted her meeting with Sticks. Her father had heard the story twice already, yet still he listened intently as she spoke. When she finished he said, “And that’s it? That’s everything you discussed?”

  Agenta knew what he was thinking: that she’d committed some slip to put Sticks on guard and was now keeping it from them to save face. The reality was, she’d gone over her conversation with Sticks a hundred times and still she didn’t see how she could have played things differently. “What if we go back to the Deeps for another look round?” she said. “That building hit by the fireball shouldn’t be hard to locate.”

  Rethell shook his head. “Sticks and his cronies will have long since moved on. We’re better off waiting for him to come to us.”

  “Oh?”

  “You came back through the harbor, remember? A boat with one corpse and four bleeding bodies draws attention.”

  “Would it make things easier if I hadn’t come back at all?” Agenta said. So what if someone has seen her at the port? The fact Sticks had moved against her suggested he’d already guessed her identity. It might not even be Agenta who had given the game away, for of the dozen men sent to follow her last night, four had failed to return. If they’d been captured and questioned by Sticks’s crowd …

  Rethell returned her gaze blankly. Then his expression softened. “You did well.”

  Agenta snorted. Was praise ever delivered so grudgingly? She was becoming accustomed to her father’s disappointment, but then how was she supposed to compete with the memory of her dead brother?

  And yet, there was no denying last night’s operation had been a failure. What had she achieved save to drive the Gadfly’s attackers deeper undercover and place a target on her chest for Sticks and his men to fire at?

  Lydanto cleared his throat. “Did you manage to swap the stone, Kalischa?”

  Agenta nodded. She withdrew from a pocket the jewel Sticks had given her to inspect, and which she had switched for one she’d bought beforehand in the Jewelry Quarter.

  The ambassador looked at Rethell. “You have been examining it already?”

  “It’s one of ours. I’m sure of it.”

  “The hijacker of the Gadfly … one of your competitors, perhaps?”

  “A competitor desperate enough to resort to piracy?”

  Lydanto blinked. “You are right, of course. I was merely—how do you say?—thinking in the loud.”

  Rethell rose and crossed to the table to pour himself a glass of water. “What have you been able to find out about these loans to the emira?”

  “Little as yet,” the ambassador conceded. “Imerle has been covering her trail well using nominees and guilds, but I am confident I will be sniffing it out eventually.” His eyes glittered. “I have, however, heard something on another matter that might be interesting you. There are rumors Lord Gensu Sensama is dead, ambushed off his home island of Airey.”

  “I’ve heard nothing of this.”

  Lydanto tapped his rosy nose. “The Storm Lords are keeping it quiet, I am thinking, until they have discovered who is responsible.”

  Agenta raised an eyebrow. As if it weren’t obvious already. Things were coming together in her mind. Imerle, intent on raising funds to finance a coup, had ordered her soldiers to hijack the Gadfly, along with the other missing ships. Now she was targeting her fellow Storm Lords in advance of launching an attack. The problem for Agenta and Rethell would be proving their suspicions—or at least proving them sufficiently to force the emira to negotiate over the stolen duskstones. While all the time hoping we don’t learn so much that we become a liability.

  A knock sounded at the door.

  “Come!” Lydanto called.

  A messenger entered wearing the emblem of the Storm Lords on his uniform. He carried a roll of parchment which he handed to Rethell before departing. The kalisch put down his glass, then broke the wax seal and unrolled the scroll. Agenta could see only a few lines of writing on the parchment, yet her father took an age to read them. At last he grunted and tossed the scroll onto the desk. He looked at Agenta.

  “It seems your adventures in the Deeps have caught the emira’s eye. We are summoned to another audience at the palace this evening.”

  * * *

  The crowds thinned as Karmel and Veran reached Dian’s Temple District, but even here it felt to the priestess as if a dozen sets of eyes tracked her every step. The doors to the White Lady’s Temple were open, and through them came a woman’s voice singing a melody pure and bright as sunlight. Karmel paid it no mind. Her thoughts were a whirr. Climb the Dragon Gate? Was Veran serious? He’d neither confirmed nor denied her hunch, but his lack of reaction to her words spoke volumes.

  Unless he’s just pulling my leg.

  No, that would mean having to credit him with a sense of humor.

  She studied her companion’s back. Had scaling the gate been the plan all along? Or had the withdrawal of whichever Chameleon she’d replaced left insufficient time to infiltrate the citadel the orthodox way? It had to be the latter, Karmel decided, for it smacked of desperation to try to climb the portcullis in full view of the crowds on the terraces and with the dragons waiting below.

  Desperation? Madness!

  The singing from the White Lady’s Temple died away as the Chameleons turned into an alley and passed the entrance to a weed-infested boneyard. At the bottom of the steps leading down to their basement lodgings was a pool of urine, and the smell followed Karmel inside as she entered behind Veran. She flung herself onto her bed. When Veran had brought her to this fleapit earlier, she’d despaired at the prospect of having to lie low here for a few days once their mission was finished. Now that seemed the least of her worries.

  Veran removed flint and steel from his pack and lit an oil lamp. Overhead, footfalls sounded as someone walked across the floor of the room above. The priest’s gaze held steady on Karmel as he waited for the noise to fade.

  “Using the citadel’s front door is a nonstarter,” he said at last. “The gatehouse will be crawling with sentries this close to Dragon Day, and there’s precious little chance of us slipping past them when their guard’s up.”

  “Right,” she said. “About the same chance of us climbing the Dragon Gate without anyone seeing.”

  “They didn’t see me last time I tried.”

  Karmel covered her surprise. “You’ve done this before?”

  He nodded.

  “You climbed all the way to the battlements?”

  “No, just to the top of the gate.”

  “When?”

  “Eleven days ago.”

  “Eleven days ago wasn’t in the middle of a Shroud-cursed festival.” Karmel was sounding increasingly agitated, but she didn’t care.

  “Shut up and listen,” Veran said. “Where the Dragon Gate meets the cliff, the rock has been carved away to form long vertical grooves. These grooves are deep, meaning there’s a section of the gate two armspans wide that is hidden by the cliff. That’s where we’ll climb.”

  “It’s a costly fall if we slip.”

  “You won’t slip because you won’t be making the initial ascent. I’ll climb up, then lower a rope for you.” />
  Karmel scowled. “I think I can manage—”

  “You’ll do as you’re bloody well told.”

  A door slammed in the room above, then a man’s voice rang out. His words were muffled by the floorboards. A woman shrieked something unintelligible in response. Karmel felt like doing some shouting herself, but before she could open her mouth Veran went on, “Midnight tonight we go back to the beach, then swim round to the gate. Dragons won’t give us any trouble because they’ll be on the other side.”

  “Why did we bother coming to the city at all, then? We could have stayed in the boat.”

  “Because while you were gawping at the dragons earlier, I was watching the soldiers on the battlements. According to our reports the guards are swapped every four bells, but I wanted to see for myself. And I’ll be going back today at the noon bell, and every fourth bell after that, to check there ain’t been a change in the routine.”

  The priestess swung her legs round and sat on the edge of the bed. “So we hit them tomorrow after the switch at the fourth bell?”

  Veran grunted in confirmation. “Dawn is after the seventh bell. Gives us plenty of time to climb up and silence the Dianese guards before it gets light.”

  “What about the soldiers on the Natillian side of the battlements? They’ll be sure to see—”

  Veran shook his head. “Dragon’s skull splits the fortifications in two, and the thing’s big enough to hide whatever’s happening on the other side. If we do things quiet, the Natillian guards won’t know what’s going on.” He reached into his pack. “Hard part will be getting onto the battlements unnoticed. They’re wider than the gate itself, so we can’t just climb up from the gate below.” He pulled out a grappling hook wrapped in black mexin and tossed it onto the bed beside Karmel. “We’ll use these. Cloth will deaden the sound of the hooks biting on the merlon.”

  The priestess eyed him skeptically. He was speaking so confidently he might have been reporting something that had already happened, but there were countless ways this plan could go to the Abyss. The battlements were wider than the gate, he’d said, which meant when the time came for the Chameleons to throw their grappling hooks, they’d be doing so blind. It also meant they wouldn’t be able to see which way the soldiers on the battlements were facing.

  Her companion must have read her thoughts for he said, “Guards will most likely be looking south at the dragons, so I’ll go up on the north side.”

  “You’ll go up,” Karmel said. “Am I here just to clap in the right places, then?” Even through her dread she could still feel anger at his condescension.

  Veran grunted. He had a grunt for every occasion, the priestess was coming to realize. This one conveyed impatience and a hint of scorn. “When the guards are dead,” he said, “I’ll strip them and use a rope to lower the bodies to you on the gate. We can’t toss them to the dragons in case someone sees them fall. You’ll have to wedge them as best you can between the gate and the cliff. No one should spot them unless they’re looking for them.”

  Strip them? “You want us to take the soldiers’ places?”

  “’S the only way we’re going to get into the citadel. Door to the control room is locked from the other side, so we’ll have to wait for someone inside to let us in.”

  In the room above, the argument was becoming more heated. A third voice—another woman’s—had joined the first two.

  Karmel said, “So we put on the dead soldiers’ uniforms and wait on the battlements until we’re relieved at the eighth bell? And what happens when the next pair of guards don’t recognize us?”

  “Dianese soldiers wear full-face helmets. If we keep our mouths shut”—he looked at her pointedly—“no one should notice the switch.”

  “And if the guards we replace are both men? Or women?” Karmel’s said, her voice rising. “Or flame-eyed Manixian firebloods?”

  Veran grunted again—a rueful grunt this time. It appeared that was all the answer he would give, though, for he turned his back on Karmel, then took out a roll of parchment and a stick of charcoal from his pack. Moving to the table beside the priestess’s bed, he unrolled the parchment. It was blank. He began drawing on it by the smoky light of the lamp. Karmel leaned forward and watched him trace the outline of a room, adding short heavy lines along two walls, together with various other markings and annotations.

  “Control room looks like this,” he said when he’d finished. “Twelve paces long, ten wide, with doors leading to the battlements and the citadel”—he gestured to the short heavy lines—“here and here. The chain that raises the Dragon Gate enters the room through the floor near the eastern wall then runs along the ground to a mechanism like a ship’s capstan”—he pointed to a circle with eight lines coming off it—“here.”

  Karmel was finding it difficult to hear his words over a string of curses from one of the women upstairs. “How many guards?”

  “Usual complement is two. Tomorrow there’ll be another eight working the capstan, one overseeing.”

  “Eleven, then.” Karmel left a pause. “Eleven versus two.”

  “With surprise on our side, we should be able to thin their numbers before they know they’re in a fight.”

  That would still leave two or three opponents each to fight, but those were odds Karmel could live with. After the shock of this morning’s revelations, her heartbeat was finally beginning to return to its normal rhythm. She looked back at the drawing. “Eight men on the capstan, right? So assuming there’s the same number on the Natillian side that makes sixteen in all. Sixteen men to lift a gate that big? What are these soldiers, titans?”

  “The chains that raise the gate are invested with air-magic. Lightens the load.”

  “You know that for sure, or you’re guessing?”

  Veran ignored her. “When the shit goes down, our priority is to lock the door to the citadel to stop reinforcements arriving. That’s where I’ll be. You give me cover.”

  From overhead came the sound of smashing glass, followed by a man’s yelp. The shouting started up again, twice as loud.

  Karmel struggled to marshal her thoughts. It seemed Veran had an answer for everything, but instead of reassuring her that just left her feeling wary. Something was niggling her, something to do with what Caval had said in their conversation at the temple. She let her mind drift …

  It came to her. Killing the guards in the control room was all well and good, but when the Dragon Gate failed to rise, more soldiers were sure to come knocking. Even if Veran barred the door to the citadel it wouldn’t keep the guards out for long, and when they broke through, what was to stop them raising the gate in place of their dead colleagues? The best Karmel and Veran could hope for was to delay the Hunt, yet according to Caval the reason for sabotaging Dragon Day was to discredit Dian’s governor in the eyes of his supporters. Would a delay be enough to light a fire under Piput’s ambitions?

  When Karmel put this to Veran his face went still, and she realized she’d touched on something he’d hoped she would overlook. He glanced at his pack. “Dragon Gate won’t be rising once we’re done. I’ve got something to take care of the capstan permanently.”

  “Something powerful enough to destroy the capstan, but not so powerful that it takes us out with it?”

  Veran did not respond.

  The priestess let the silence drag out, but her companion didn’t fill it. Even now he was keeping secrets from her, but why? What else could there be about the mission he hadn’t told her? How could the picture be any bleaker than the one he’d already painted? Her gaze flickered to his pack. Perhaps when he went out at noon to watch the changeover of the Dianese guards she would find an excuse to stay behind and sneak a peek inside.

  When she looked back at Veran, though, she saw from his eyes that he’d read her intent.

  Damn him.

  “What happens after this capstan is destroyed?” she said. “Odds are, more soldiers will be coming along the battlements from Natilly. The dragon’s
skull won’t hold them forever. We’ll be trapped.”

  “So what if we are?”

  She stared at him.

  “Dianese won’t know they’re dealing with Chameleons,” he said. “There’s no reason for them to look for something they can’t see.” Veran stabbed a finger at the plan. “Northwest corner of the chamber is screened by a weapons cabinet. That’s where we’ll wait for the dust to settle.”

  They might even get away with it, Karmel conceded. When the soldiers broke into the control room it would be from the citadel first, and the guards would find a room full of corpses and the door to the battlements locked from the inside. They’d probably assume some of their own had turned traitor, and that the two factions had wiped each other out. “So first chance we get we slip out to the battlements—”

  “We’re not going back to the battlements.”

  Karmel was incredulous. “You want to leave through the citadel? So, what, the fortress is too well-guarded for us to break in, but we’ll have no trouble getting out?”

  “The difference is time. If we can keep from under the soldiers’ feet for a few bells, we’ll have all the time we need to pick our way out.”

  “But the battlements—”

  “If we go back to the battlements someone from the terraces might see us.”

  Karmel shrugged. “So we make a break for it at night—dive into the sea on the north side of the gate then swim round to the boat.”

  “Too risky.”

  “Whereas trying to sneak through the citadel—”

  “It’s too risky, I said!” Veran snatched up the plan and put one end in the flame of the oil lamp. As the parchment burned, he tossed it to the floor and watched it blacken to ash.

  Karmel opened her mouth to speak, but her companion glowered at her. The words died in her throat. It wasn’t that she was cowed by him; she just knew that he wouldn’t answer any more questions.