When Dragons Rage

by Michael A. Stackpole

  The people unsettled Isaura. She had traveled with Nefrai-kesh and Vionna via arcane ways that left her and the pirate queen on the verge of exhaustion. Nefrai-kesh, being a sullanciri, did not suffer from the journey and had been about his appointed tasks. Likewise, Spyr’skara weathered the journey well in his shell. Vionna released him and he quickly grew from the size of a large spider into a man-sized arachnomorph. Isaura linked Spyr’skara to the decoy fragment, letting magick direct the sullanciri to its target. Spyr’skara snapped its mandibles at his former lover, then leaped away to the rooftops.

  They watched the new sullanciri for a while, then Vionna led Isaura off to secure rooms in the King’s Masque Inn. The place appeared, as nearly as Isaura could determine, to be largely populated by Okrans refugees in service to some noble or other. They were to wait there for the return of Spyr’skara and the ruby fragment of the DragonCrown.

  The innkeeper did have two rooms available, though he was reluctant to rent them both to Vionna. The pirate found this curious, since Isaura, wearing a hooded cloak of whitest ermine, stood behind her as she made her request. The innkeeper refused to acknowledge Isaura’s presence, but acquiesced when Vionna paid double the night’s rate in gold and in advance.

  Isaura felt no compunction to tell the pirate that she was using magick to conceal her presence. It was not a spell that prevented people from seeing her per se, for that would be impractical at best and was, as nearly as she knew, impossible. Instead the magick just made it simple for people to forget they had seen her. Her mother had taught her the complex spell and had worked with her until she had perfected its casting and maintenance.

  Chytrine had explained it rather simply, despite the spell’s being quite a twisted confluence of magickal energies. Most individuals, men chiefly among them, take every bit of information they learn in a day and sort it like with like. What the spell did was to soften the points used to make such matches. Anyone looking at her would see a woman in a hooded cloak of white, but as they sought a similar image to compare her against, they might lose white or cloak or woman. As they tried to find another point, it, too, would vanish. Chytrine had likened it to trying to identify a wine by taste. After four mouthfuls, you might think you had it, but by then the wine would be gone. In the mind of the observer, there would be nothing to remember.

  Vionna could see her because Isaura chose to permit it. Aside from not wanting to be rude to a traveling companion, Isaura did need someone who had experience of the Southlands to help her. Anytime she wished Vionna to forget she existed, well . . . The girl smiled; the pirate queen was not possessed of so sharp a mind that she could pierce the spell unaided.

  The inn’s common room held both horror and delight for Isaura. The acrid scent of unwashed bodies, sour beer, urine, and woodsmoke from the huge hearth assaulted her. Even the heat was oppressive, with the blazing fire raising temperatures to a hedonistic level that would have consumed a week’s cooking wood in Aurolan in a night here. The fire’s ashes, from what little she had seen of the city, would not be used to fertilize a field, but would be tossed into the streets to darken snow and hasten its melting.

  The people also surprised her. They presented a panoply of humanity, with hair of every hue and length. People tall and lean spoke with the short and fat. Twisted, humpbacked old women huddled in a corner, rocking, talking, watching with squinted eyes in puckered faces. Young men said things to a servant that made her stop, and her return comment made one of them turn a hot red. Clothing, most of it filthy, covered them in layers and seemed less meant to keep them warm than to make some sort of display.

  She found it all repellent, and would have dashed away up the stairs in Vionna’s wake save for one thing. The old women, and the companions of the reddened youth, and most everyone else, laughed. Some were hearty laughs, some giggles, and some cackles of triumph or disgust, but they were laughs. Isaura could identify it as laughter easily enough, but had never heard so much in one place. And it made her smile.

  Vionna tugged on her arm. “I said, come on.”

  Isaura blinked her silver eyes. “Yes, forgive me.”

  The Aurolani princess followed quietly, less hoping for useful instruction from Vionna than to catch any further laughter from below. The pirate led her up the stairs and down a narrow corridor. She pushed open a door, then took a candle from a wall sconce and used it to light the lamp on the small table beside the bed.

  Isaura shivered. While she approved of the room’s size—small enough to be a proper Aurolani room built to warm easily—the low pallet on which she was to sleep had a thin blanket and a thinner mattress. The scent of moldy straw filled the room, though the lamp’s burning oil competed for domination. The tall ceiling bothered her, since all the warm air rose there, but a constant supply could stream up through the gaps between the floorboards from the common room below.

  She pointed to the mattress. “This is soiled.”

  Vionna bent over and took a deep sniff. “Only a couple of weeks old. There’s nothing here that will hurt you.”

  “But I do not wish to sleep on it.”

  Vionna straightened up, quickly covering the contempt flashing over her face. “Then I shall take this room and you may have the other.”

  They crossed the hallway and found another similarly snug room, and the mattress did, indeed, have more and fresher straw. Vionna made a big show of sniffing the straw, then waving a hand toward it. “Perhaps more to your liking, Princess.”

  “Perhaps.” Isaura sat on the edge of the bed. “I am fatigued. You may call upon me later.”

  The pirate nodded. “As you wish.” The disdain she kept off her face still seeped into her words. “Later we shall explore, if that is what you want.”

  Isaura nodded, then waved her out of the room with a light flick of her right hand. “That would please me.”

  The pirate covered a yawn with her hand, then wandered out and closed the door behind her. Isaura heard the other door close and slowly smiled. The gesture of dismissal had spawned a spell that created a current linking the two of them. It eroded Vionna’s energy and brought to Isaura the fleeting impression of the pirate’s intent to find other ways to make the youths in the common room blush. Yet because of the spell, Vionna received Isaura’s fatigue, and the Aurolani Princess stood, refreshed as if she had napped for hours.

  She acknowledged that using the spell on Vionna without her consent was not the sort of thing done to a friend, but Vionna was not a friend. Isaura had exaggerated the displeasure at the straw to provide Vionna a reason for disliking her. The pirate clearly had no desire to be her escort and saw her as a delicate rime-blossom that had no business being in the south at all.

  Isaura harbored no illusions about her own lack of experience, but she also knew that did not make her a fool. She had learned much and would learn much more, but Vionna’s contempt hardly made her a good instructor. Moreover, Isaura’s mother had desired her to visit the Southlands to learn about them, and being toured around by a renegade-in-heat would hardly provide her with the sort of information she wanted.

  With the wave of a finger Isaura extinguished her lamp and entered the hallway. She drifted past Vionna’s door, suppressing a smile at the snores echoing from within, then descended the stairs. A man coming up twisted his back to the wall to let her pass, though by the time he reached the hallway above he had forgotten her. She passed out the door and into the darkened street, leaving a shivering couple near the common room door wondering where the draft had come from.

  Knowing the track of her boots in the snow would betray her presence, Isaura kept to the streets and walkways on which the snow had been tamped down by the feet of passersby. She saw well enough at night that she eschewed magick to enhance her sight. She did regret the way snow covered everything, for she wished she could see what lurked in the alley middens. From what little she could see as two tatterdemalions dug through one mound, each would have been a treasure trove in Aurolan, with usef
ul bits of wood and food and scrap metal.

  Wandering through the city as night fell and the day’s warmth fled, she found a city slowing as if moving toward hibernation. People hurried along the streets and crowded into common houses that rang with laughter. Yellow light and flickering shadows splashed over snow, and while the night was not nearly cold enough to discomfit her, Isaura still felt a chill.

  She recognized it immediately for it was no stranger to her. In Aurolan she felt it often. Distance existed between her and the others. The sullanciri viewed her with a reverence that invited no intimacy. Nefrai-laysh might joke with her, or compose simple rhymes, but she knew that to be a compulsion with him, not anything born of affection. Neskartu, while praising her skills at magick, did not show her even as much fondness as he did his students.

  The students never got a chance to form any sort of attachment to her, nor she to them. They differed from her in so many ways that even if she had been allowed to spend much time with them, the chances that they would have liked her were small. She knew that, and used that realization to insulate her from disappointment.

  She did know there were people out there who would like her and welcome her as wanderers were welcomed into warm taverns. That much she had been told and she believed those predictions. It surprised her that she wanted such acceptance. In Aurolan she was known and revered by all because of her mother, but here she would be accepted for being herself. That would be as novel an experience as was her trip to the Southlands.

  Isaura continued wandering, but refrained from making conscious decisions about where she would go and what she would do. Instead she opened herself to the vast river of magick and let it carry her along. She invoked no spells, but let the eddies and currents nudge her this way and that. Forces outside her control, be they spells cast by others, the whims of the gods, or oaths and truths that once uttered became living entities themselves, were breezes to the sails that were her spirit.

  A small ripple sent a tingle through her. She turned left and drifted through the falling snow to another inn. She entered and ascended the stairs and came to a vacant hallway. She strode along quickly, clutching her cloak tightly to quiet her dress’ rustle. Loud voices sounded from behind the door on the right, but that was not her destination.

  She opened the door on the left, entered, then pressed it closed behind her. In the room’s bed lay a youth to whom clung a foul miasma. Though the room was dark, she could see clearly the translucent white hue of his sweaty flesh and the livid red of the venous webwork in his skin. His breath rasped in and out as his chest rose and fell. Short and sharp came his breaths, labored and weakening. She could tell they were weakening.

  A Spritha stood on the pillow beside the young man’s left ear. The little creature looked up at her and froze. “Go, out, go out.”

  Isaura raised her left index finger, circled it toward the ceiling, then plunged it straight down. The Spritha dropped the hair he had been braiding, spun on the pillow, and plopped down hard. He sprawled there facefirst, his arms and legs splayed out.

  She crossed to the bed and eased her hood down before she folded the cloak back at her shoulders. As she neared the youth she could feel the heat rising from him. She closed her eyes and cast a simple spell, then recoiled at the vehemence of the sensation that came back to her. She gasped aloud and raised a hand to cover her mouth.

  The young man had a virulent poison running through him. It ate at him like acid. It was digesting him, slowly, inexorably, and had already done severe damage. He had perhaps hours to live, maybe a day.

  Just learning that was abhorrent enough, but Isaura found the poison familiar. She wanted to deny it, but she could not. It had come from Spyr’skara. She had helped Neskartu create the sullanciri, so she could feel its influence and taint in the venom. She even knew the sullanciri had been given that sort of weapon, but for self-defense.

  It was meant for self-defense, but how could this boy threaten a sullanciri? He could not have, clearly—and just as clearly Spyr’skara had bitten him out of spite or a desire to inflict pain, or just a desire to confirm his newfound power. His action had been a betrayal of everything her mother held dear.

  Isaura shook her head slowly and refused to let her mother’s efforts be tainted by the actions of a flawed creation she had worked to build. She reached out and plunged her spirit into the river while laying her hands, left and right respectively, on the boy’s fevered brow and breastbone. She drew to her deep magick, then flooded it cold and pure into the youth.

  His body bucked and tensed. His back bowed violently, then slackened and fell back hard enough to bounce the Spritha into the air. Another tremor shook the youth, then his eyes snapped open and his hands clawed at the blankets. His head craned back and his mouth opened, but he said nothing.

  He just stared at her, wide-eyed and half-insane from pain and fear.

  The magick she coursed into him did not take the shape of a spell per se, but instead flushed through his body and veins, diluting the venom. Where the poison had been molten, the magick was cool. Where the poison had irritated, the magick soothed. The magick cleansed his body of the venom and swept it swirling out into the river, where it would be neutralized.

  Half the job is done. Isaura set herself to cast a spell that would repair the damage. She would begin with his neck, for his thrashing had peeled away the bandages, revealing two weeping, necrotic holes, one beneath each ear.

  “Your part is done, little sister.” The voice rumbled from the darkness to her right, but she could not turn her head to see who spoke. She felt old magick holding her still; she knew its nature and nodded because she knew she would be permitted that motion.

  “You are in danger here. Leave before you are detected. The rest shall be attended to. He will live and you will know him when you meet again.”

  Isaura looked down on the youth’s face and into his grey eyes. “I will know you when we meet again.”

  His lids grew heavy and his eyes slowly closed. His breathing came more regularly and the rattles from his chest had all but vanished. She smiled, then exited the room, trailing in the wake of two guardsmen who, though one held the door to the inn for her, had forgotten her before the door had swung shut.

  Across the hall from Will’s sickroom, Scrainwood’s assessment of the deal they’d made left Alexia uneasy, but anything she might say could break their agreement. In the shadow of the dead sullanciri, she turned her attention to the one remaining problem. “Now we have to figure out how to save Will.”

  The Oriosan king nodded. “I have already sent summonses to mages from throughout the kingdom. I will not lose the Norrington!”

  The door to Kerrigan’s room swung open and Will slumped against the casement. “Lose me?” His voice came raw, hoarse and wet. “How will you lose me?” The naked youth’s eyes rolled up in his head, and he fell back into a startled Dranae’s arms.

  CHAPTER 25

  K errigan awoke with the rumble of his empty stomach. Still in darkness, with only the growling of his bowels to compete with the dripping of water, he found himself disoriented for a moment. As it slowly came back to him where he was—though he had no idea where there was or why he was there—he began to wonder how long he had slept. The hollowness in his middle suggested he’d missed a meal.

  He frowned. He liked to eat, and did it often, so his missing a meal might have meant he’d been gone for two hours or four, or two days. He made a mental note that he didn’t know of any spell that would inform him of the time or date, and began to consider how he would go about creating one.

  As he thought, he heaved himself up off the straw-strewn ground and tightened the blanket around him. He coughed a little, but it was from a scratchy dry throat, not the wet cough he’d had before. While he was young and healthy, he was also aware that such coughs usually lingered for several days, and he refused to believe he’d slept that long. He played a hand over his jaw and felt little patches of stubble, that suggeste
d he was less than a day and a half out from his last shave.

  That means they used magick to clear my lungs.

  The realization pleased him for two reasons. The first was that it indicated his captors did not intend to destroy him immediately. Healing spells were not easy to cast and, aside from himself, he knew of no human capable of doing so. This meant the person he’d spoken with had to be one of the elder races: elves or urZrethi. Since neither of them was known for being overly homicidal, Kerrigan gained some confidence.

  The latter half of his realization—that his captor had to be a member of an elder race—gave him heart that his captivity actually had purpose. Few urZrethi or elves were in service to Chytrine, so the chances of his being turned over to her were diminished. Exactly what would be expected from him, on the other hand, he had no clue.

  A click sounded off to his right. He turned to look and discovered a rectangle of light outlining a doorway. One of the horizontal shafts widened as the door opened. He struggled to his feet and staggered forward, but waited well shy of the portal. He expected another test and listened for noises that might reveal a trap.

  “Please, Adept Reese, enter.”

  Kerrigan crept closer and felt cooler air moving from the prison into the lighted room. He had to push the door open more fully to accommodate his bulk, even when he twisted to the side, then he pressed it closed behind him. The door shut with a muffled click and Kerrigan hoped he would never be required to pass back through it again.

  The chamber into which he entered felt smaller than the prison and was an absolute farrago of priceless treasures and filthy trash. Barely twelve feet wide, and perhaps eight high and twenty long, its interior dimensions were defined by the forward edges of deep shelves, which contained rows of books running floor to ceiling. In some places the books had been recessed and trinkets arranged on the shelves—varying from oddly shaped rocks and the mounted skeletons of birds and beasts to artifacts of an arcane and unknowable nature.