Gods & Dragons: 8 Fantasy Novels

by Daniel Arenson

  Laying the Demonary carefully open in his lap, Garet began to read. The symbols were not as graceful as his mother’s or even his own, and the lines sometimes wandered from straight to slanted. With a twinge of disappointment, Garet realized that the book was probably the copy work of a young Bane, not the work of a true book maker. The illustrations were another matter, though. Each one had been drawn in a confident hand and with much detail. They were not on the paper of the book itself but had been pasted on the back of various pages throughout the Demonary. Each drawing showed a demon. The variety was bewildering. At least twelve different types were shown, maybe more, as some illustrations were collections of different parts of demon bodies and must have represented more than one demon.

  As the sun cut across the heavens, Garet read through the book as a traveller in the desert takes a long drink from an oasis pool. A thirst for something greater than his own poor life had been building in him for years. In the kindness of his mother’s eyes, in the brief protection given him by his eldest brother, and even in his sister, Allia’s, careless courage, he had seen a nobility in the world that spoke against everything his father cultivated on that drab prison of a farm. And he wanted that nobility—to serve it, or if he was worthy, to live it. In teaching him to read, his mother had fed that hunger, and now he devoured each symbol and illustration. He heard no sound or voice and even Marick gave up trying to bother him. At last, as the shadows lengthened across the road, he closed the worn cover and looked up. Mandarack’s eyes were upon him, grey and calm.

  “I hope it was what you were seeking, Garet,” the Banemaster said.

  Garet saw that everyone else’s eyes were on him. Dorict’s were as calm as his Master’s. Marick’s blue eyes were full of lively anticipation. And Salick’s? To Garet’s surprise, they seemed to show concern, as if she feared he might be disappointed. He took a deep breath and gathered his thoughts.

  “It is, Master,” he replied, looking up to meet that calm regard. “I just don’t know how to take it all in.” He felt as if he had eaten past full or taken in too much air at a single breath and now struggled to hold it.

  “We have all felt some of that,” Mandarack said, leaning forward to emphasize his words. “In the Hall we call it our second birth—into a very strange life, I suppose. Most find it as difficult as their first birth.” He leaned back again. “But we all grow into it.” A short yelp told Garet that Salick had forestalled Marick’s attempt to enter the conversation.

  “You have come farther than most to this new life. We have never had a Bane from the North.”

  “I was born on the Plains, Master,” Garet replied in a soft voice.

  The grey eyes closed again. “Yes, Garet, but only for your first life.”

  His voice had the hush of evening in it, and Salick soon found a beaten down patch of earth beside the road to stop at for the night. The ground was a maze of ruts and well-used fire pits. Wood had been stacked near the central pit, and the young Banes quickly set up camp. As true night fell, they ate well of the supplies Boronict had placed in the cart and then laid their blankets down beside the dying fire. Dorict had dragged Marick off to help with the washing of pots. Mandarack, as was his habit, had walked beyond the circle of light and was looking up at the stars, his good arm clasping the withered one behind his back.

  Garet took this opportunity to ask Salick some questions he would have been embarrassed to ask Mandarack.

  “Salick?”

  She looked up from the fire to regard him, the light chasing shadows across her face.

  He swallowed and pressed on. “Salick, there seems to be something wrong with the Demonary.” He paused, waiting for an explosion of passionate defense, but the Bane only raised her left eyebrow.

  “Some of the symbols were strange, though my mother swore she had taught them all to me.” Salick nodded at him, and he continued. “And the drawings do not match the text.” His frustration boiled up and into words. “There is no order to it! Moret starts talking about a “Glider Demon” and drops it in mid-sentence to describe a Basher, while the drawing is of something called a “Squeezer,” which is never described in the book!” He thumped the ground with his fist, raising a little cloud of angry dust. “It’s like sitting in the tavern at Three Roads and listening to six conversations at once. You can’t make sense of it.” He looked warily at Salick, but to his surprise, she was smiling.

  “I believe you, Garet. That book was probably the copy work of a Blue or Green and was made from a copy by another Blue or Green. And so on, back a hundred years! Each student’s mistakes were lovingly preserved, or added to!” She stretched out on her blanket and said sleepily, “Honestly, I think a Bane learns nothing until they become a Green and apprentice to a Master. Master Mandarack has taught me more in one year than I learned in six years from those musty books!”

  “But they should be useful!” Garet protested. “What is written in a book should be true!” He had no other way of expressing his deep sense of betrayal, something that he had not dared express to Mandarack. “Don’t you see, Salick? Writing is rare. It takes so long to learn it, and so few people ever do. Whatever is written must be…beautiful!” He blushed at his own passion, and Salick shook her head.

  “Garet, there is no use getting upset. I sympathize! I cursed the Demonary myself when I was a Black, but you will have to puzzle it out for yourself the way we all did.” She rolled over, her back a definite sign that the conversation was over.

  Garet could not resist one more comment. “Well, at least this copy should be fixed. It’s a disgrace!”

  “A good idea.” Mandarack had come back unnoticed to the fire while Garet had been complaining to Salick. “You should practice your writing as well as your reading. Salick has some writing materials. You may start tomorrow.” The dry voice had no hint of irony.

  A clanging of pots signalled the return of Dorict and Marick. The smaller Bane laughed. “Never complain yourself into more work, Garet!” He set the pots by the fire and climbed into his blanket, but stopped his movements, openmouthed at Garet’s reply to Mandarack: “Thank you, Master. I look forward to beginning.” Marick sadly shook his head and, looking over at his fellow Blue, said, “He’ll never make it in the Hall, Dorict. The first rule is to never volunteer for extra work!” Dorict shook his head as well, although it was perhaps as much at Marick as at Garet.

  The next morning Garet sat cross-legged on the floor of the cart, using his seat as a writing table. The Demonary was open on the bench and an ink pot held down a sheaf of papers. With a short brush, of a size to fit in a traveller’s writing case, Garet carefully soaked it in the ink according to Salick’s instructions. His first attempts at writing symbols were marred by the way the brush fanned out and smudged the word if he used too much pressure. This had not been a problem for him before. No matter how hard you pressed with a wet finger, it still made a finger-shaped mark, not a black blot the size of his knuckle.

  When his practice characters finally became readable, he inked in the title of the book on the top of the first page. Then he paused. For all his complaints, he was unsure about how to fix the book. A thought scratched at him like a claw: maybe he was unworthy to fix it. Maybe the problem was in him and not in the Demonary. Why should he think that he knew better than the Banehalls? But he pushed that thought down deep and remembered that Salick had agreed with him, and Mandarack had approved of his plan. It was shoddy work, and that had never been tolerated on the farm, even by his mother. Garet remembered her gentle scoldings, “Now Garet, if you write in such a sloppy hand, no one will think you educated, and they will blame your teacher, and that’s me!” Nothing, not even his father’s beatings, could have made him work harder to perfect his writing skills. At least in that, he could improve this book. The title page he had written was already an improvement over the blocky, childlike writing of the unknown copyist.

  But what about the mangled information? If he just copied it again, albeit in a be
tter hand, his main complaint would go unanswered. Mandarack’s order had made it clear; it was his own business and no one else’s. If he wanted it fixed, he had to figure out a way of fixing it himself. He sighed and wished the Demonary were like one of the ballads he had learned as a child. They told a story that made sense. The hero, his companions, the dragon they were to kill, each was introduced in verse after verse of poetic description. By the end of the song, you could see it all so clearly in your head. There was a definite beginning, middle, and end. To hear one of those songs was to live it like a second life!

  He paused, the brush still in his hand, poised above the ink bottle. Well, why not like a song? Each demon could be like a dragon in a ballad, given its description and strengths and evil deeds all in one place, not scattered throughout the book. He could make a page for each one, and try to copy the illustrations on the back, each picture with its rightful description.

  He dipped the brush and wiped the excess ink off the tip as Salick had shown him. At the top of a blank page, he wrote “Basher.” Picking up the Demonary, he leafed through the pages for the six different references to this particular demon he had seen. At each page, he wrote down the information on his copy, being careful not to repeat the original’s mistakes in writing and grammar. He did not try to give his own descriptions the chanting rhythm of a heroic ballad, but instead tried to write as if he were explaining the creature to someone else. He asked Dorict and sometimes Salick about words he could not read, and once had to nervously ask Mandarack about a confused reference to poison in a passage about a “Crawler Demon.” Before he knew it, the morning had passed, and they were stopping to take their lunch.

  The road had wandered closer to the river here. Dorict and Garet beat a path through the tall grass and filled buckets for the horses and bottles for themselves. The water ran fast, and they could hear the hiss and clatter of a set of rapids downstream.

  Returning to the cart, they sat with their backs against the stones of a long-tumbled wall and ate leisurely. Garet’s mind was still dizzy with the countless facts about demons he had been hunting out of the book, so to distract himself, he asked Salick about a minor matter that had been puzzling him since they left the falls.

  “Salick, why are there no cities in this valley? It looks like many people lived here once, and the soil is good.” He picked up a handful of the dark earth and compressed it into a loose ball. The shape held until he dropped it back onto the ground: a sure sign that it would grow a good crop.

  Salick paused before answering. “We don’t learn anything about this part of the valley in the Halls, Garet.” She looked over at Mandarack. “Master, did many people live here before the demons came?”

  The old man nodded. “Six hundred years ago, the upper valley was as rich and populous as the Midlands. The farms in this area looked to the Lords of a large town we will stop near tonight.” He answered Salick’s look of surprise. “There is, of course, no town there now. Only the Temple remains, and the town’s name, Terrich. The rest of the town, all the buildings and walls, went to make part of the road we travel on.” Garet looked at the grey, square blocks surfacing the road and tried to imagine them upright, in a high wall.

  The Banemaster continued, “After the demons appeared in the South, those who survived gathered in large groups, protected by the first Banes and ruled by the surviving Lords. Some Lords would not submit to the common good and tried to live without change in their fortresses. When they could not convince the Terrich Lords to help the new cities under the shield of the Overking, the Banes abandoned them to their fate. Without the Banes, demons hunted the Terrich Lords through their own streets like rabbits.” His dry voice, so at odds with the terror he described, held them motionless. “The few peasants and townspeople who survived fled that madness and came for help to Shirath. In those chaotic times, it was a month before a force of Banes, drawn from each city, could ride out to search the town. What they found is written of in the records of the Shirath Banehall. There was no one left to save. The demons had done their work. The town was burned and the walls toppled to keep other fools from using it as a false sanctuary.”

  The young Banes blanched at the thought of a city’s population killed in such a horrible fashion. Garet blurted out, “How many demons did the Banes have to kill?”

  Mandarack replied, “There is no mention of that in the records. Perhaps when the Banes arrived in force the last demon had left to hunt for new prey.”

  “But Master,” Garet objected, “to kill a town full of people, there must have been many demons. Did they all attack the other cities?” he asked, unaware of Salick’s glare and the younger Banes’ look of incomprehension. Even Mandarack seemed to wonder at the question.

  “I am not sure of your meaning, Garet.”

  “Well, it’s said in the North a dragon in its rage will not stop attacking a village until all are dead, and then it moves on to a new village. That is why they must be killed. Don’t demons continue to attack until they are killed?”

  The old Bane seemed troubled by the question, and Salick hissed at Garet, a look of fury on her face.

  “Forgive me, Master.” Garet hastily added, “It’s a foolish question. I am ignorant of these things and will study more.” He crouched against the wall and wrapped his legs with his arms, wishing he could disappear.

  Mandarack held up his hand to stop Salick’s intimidation. “No Garet, it is a very interesting question indeed. But I’m afraid that I have no answer for you.” A trace of a smile lifted a corner of his mouth. “I too am ignorant of these things and must study more.”

  Salick stared at her Master, open-mouthed, and then quickly busied herself packing up their cooking things. Marick winked at Garet conspiratorially while Dorict shook his head and went to help Salick. Mandarack walked thoughtfully to the river and regarded the water. Garet followed Marick to see to the horses.

  “Garet!” Salick’s strong hand grabbed his shoulder and pulled him around. Her eyes were bright with fury and she fairly spat out her words. “Why do you ask questions that no one can answer, not even…” Her lips compressed, and Garet knew that her anger was born of her concern for her master’s honour and reputation. She could not bear to see her master bested by any situation. “What is the use of such questions?” she demanded.

  Now used to Salick’s moods, Garet gathered his courage to answer her back. “I ask such questions because I have to know, Salick. You Southerners are all practically born with this knowledge. You learn it from your parents the way I learned about dragons and farming and tracking rabbits. If I ask questions which cannot be answered,” his voice rose in frustration, “it’s only because I’m ignorant of what I must know!” He shook off her hand and stomped to the cart to take his place on the floorboards. He avoided Salick’s eyes as she helped Mandarack mount and then silently took her place on the driver’s bench with Marick. The young Bane wisely restrained from commenting on the air of obvious ill-feelings.

  The long afternoon of writing and reading, swaying back and forth in the back of the cart, worked the irritation out of his mood. By the time they stopped, he had wheedled out full descriptions of seven demons from the confusing pages of the text. The concentration he had spent on the text had also lessened his frustration with Salick. Mandarack had looked over his shoulder once or twice but had made no comment. Dorict, bored with the long ride, had asked Garet for the finished pages. He read them through in his slow, careful way and nodded at him.

  “I wish I had had this when I was a Black Sash. The tests would have been much easier.” He handed back the pages. “You know, when you get through this, I could give you a few Blue texts to rewrite.”

  Marick rolled his eyes. “Dorict, why don’t you do it yourself? I swear you’d starve if your hunger wasn’t just slightly greater than your laziness!” The small Bane grinned at Garet. “Maybe we should call this the Garet Demonary from now on.”

  Garet’s protest came a split second before Sa
lick’s outraged gasp. He quickly denied the compliment. “Marick, I didn’t write any of this, I just organized it so that it was easier to read. I got the idea from the songs my mother used to sing to me.”

  Salick had rounded on Marick and Dorict. “Don’t you two fill his head with praise! Garet is still just a Black Sash; he has the same duties, responsibilities,” her tone turned acid, “and limitations of any beginner in the Hall.”

  The way she had stressed the words limitations and beginner, told Garet that Salick had not forgotten their argument. He crouched down over the papers, and tried to block out her anger by concentrating on some cryptic comments about a demon called a Scraper.

  Despite his concentration, he could not avoid hearing Marick’s return jibe: “If we all stuck to our limitations, Salick, Dorict and I would be back in Shirath practicing beginning weapons, and you would be holding the reins for some Gold while older Banes got all the fun. You hate limitations as much as I do!”

  Because she made no response, Garet did not know whether Salick agreed or disagreed.

  He was glad when, in the early evening, the cart shuddered to a halt. The road had moved away from the water for most of the afternoon. It had cut straight across a bulge of land that squeezed the river into a bow-curve of white, foaming rapids. Now the road and river met again: the road giving up straight lines for gentle curves and the river leaving this first set of rapids for a calmer, more stately flow.

  The sun was still high in the sky, so Garet was surprised when Salick unhitched the horses and the two younger Banes started unloading their blanket rolls and cooking gear.

  “Marick, aren’t we going on ‘til dark?” he asked.