Song of the Beast

by Carol Berg

  “Then why am I here? I’ve no intention of risking my neck for your private adventure. It’s only my swearing to Narim that keeps me with you. If you’re not interested in his plan, I’ll be off in a heartbeat. But what would you do then? Once you get inside a camp, how do you think to keep the dragons from cooking you while you figure out what to do? Will you sing to them?”

  We were both tired from constant hiding and running, and we hadn’t even begun the search. He just didn’t see the impossibility of it, and I couldn’t make my tongue keep still. I wanted him to lash out, to explode in anger at the cruel things I said to him, to demand to know what I was hiding, so perhaps I would have no excuse to hide it anymore. But all he did was bury his anger. “Of course you’re right. Send him whatever message you want. But I’m going ahead.” I wanted to kick him.

  We backtracked half a day’s walk to a wretched little market town called Durvan. Half the houses and shops were burned rubble, and the other half were worse: dark little hovels with sagging sod roofs, rotting timbers, and filthy rugs hung over the doors to keep out the rain and wind. Pigs rooted in the lanes, and people emptied slops jars right outside their doors. I never could see why people would think such places were better than tents. No one in the town would look you in the eye, and no one looked as if they’d had a decent meal in a year.

  Just at the edge of the houses sat the Bone and Thistle, the inn where Davyn had been working at the time MacAllister was released from prison. We found two Elhim working there, a groom and a pot boy, neither of them familiar to me. They claimed not to know our friends and didn’t want anything to do with us. They just about chewed their boots when we made a sideways mention of Cor Talaith. But just before nightfall, when we slipped into the local market to restock our food supplies, we saw Davyn and Tarwyl playing draughts on an upended barrel.

  They continued their game as we strolled past, and showed no sign that they knew us. I thought for a moment we must be wrong. One Elhim looks very much like another. But MacAllister said he could not mistake the hair that always fell over Davyn’s left eye nor Tarwyl’s nose that had been broken and healed crooked, so he assumed they were being cautious. We followed their lead and did not search them out, but took our time leaving the town. Sure enough, at nightfall, just as we left the last straggling shacks behind, two Elhim drifted onto the roadway two hundred paces ahead of us. We kept our distance and made sure no other travelers were watching as we followed the two down a narrow track into a thickly wooded glade. They were waiting with a lantern and outstretched hands.

  “By the One!” said Davyn. “We’d almost given up on you. Not a word, not a glimpse, not a hint of your whereabouts until Greck and Salvor sent the news. You’ll probably hear a great sigh of relief go up through the land. We’ve set watchers everywhere.”

  “It seemed prudent to stay hidden,” said the Senai. “We’ve had a wicked time avoiding Ridemark patrols. I would as soon have kept it that way, but Lara seems to think we’ll never accomplish anything without Narim. I have less faith in his plans. I can get people killed well enough on my own.”

  “We’ve known the risk ever since we took Lara in,” said Davyn. “You must understand that it could have happened anytime. And Iskendar and his followers agreed to that risk. They never regretted helping her, no matter what the consequences would be. And they never regretted helping you either. You could have stayed there in peace forever if—”

  “If I hadn’t given them reason to believe I was still interested in gods and dragons.”

  “Yes. I see you’ve come to some understanding of the attempt on your life. When we saw your beacon, all knew what it could mean. Narim ... all of us ... tried to make Iskendar listen to reason. He didn’t have to agree with us; all he had to do was get out and live. But he wouldn’t. It’s not your fault.” Davyn laid his hand on MacAllister’s arm.

  The Senai didn’t welcome it, but he didn’t shake it off either. “Perhaps if I had known some of this earlier, we might have been able to avoid the event as well as the guilt. So where is Narim?”

  “He’s helping the survivors find a place to settle until we can find a new sanctuary. With your permission, we’ll send him news right away. He is most concerned ... most anxious, as you can imagine, to find out what’s happened with you ... what happened with Keldar. We’ve all wondered. ...”

  “We need to keep moving. I’ll tell you about Keldar as we go.”

  As we set out again on the darkening road, MacAllister was gloomy and untalkative. The Elhim enjoyed themselves as always. Davyn clapped Tarwyl on the back. “Never will I go plotting without you, friend. ‘Sit in the market,’ you said. ‘After thirteen days of hiding, they’ll need supplies.’ ”

  Tarwyl laughed his deep-throated laugh, always unexpected from a soft-faced Elhim. “At least you remembered to bring your kit. I’ll have to share your cup and dig into my purse to buy a change of shirt!”

  I brought up the rear and watched for pursuit. Someone had to keep a mind on danger.

  In the three weeks since that day, we had visited three dragon camps. Tarwyl and Davyn would work their way into the lair, posing as an ironmonger’s assistants looking for custom from the Ridemark, or supply clerks hunting work. MacAllister instructed them to watch for any dragon that looked older than average and had either an oddly formed shoulder or back, or one that seemed to draw an unusual number of birds about it. Idiot. He might as well have told them to look for Grimaldi the dwarf king, the enchanted swan Ludmilla, or any other creature from his myth songs. But the Elhim took the Senai’s word as god-spoken. At the first three camps they had found no possibilities, and now we sat in the hovel near Fandine, waiting, waiting, waiting—interminably waiting.

  “At last!” The sun was low when I saw the two slight figures coming over the rise in the road at the edge of Wyefedd. I yelled at the two as they strolled casually toward our hiding place. “Can you lift your feet any slower?” I said. “We’ve had such an exciting day waiting for you, I can’t bear it to end.”

  “We’re saving something for the journey back,” said Davyn.

  I felt MacAllister jump up in the darkness behind me. “You found something?”

  “There are four dragons in Fandine. One of them has a ‘bad wing.’ We didn’t see it, but the smith told us of it. We could see flocks of birds over the place where it lay. It seems the first possibility.”

  “We’ll go in tonight,” said MacAllister. “Show me how to find him.”

  With a burned stick Tarwyl drew a map on a scrap of wood, showing a little-used path into the lair, the guard posts, the outbuildings, the Riders’ huts, and the approximate position of the kai.

  “How will you know if he’s the one, Aidan?” asked Davyn. “You’ve never told us what you plan. Perhaps we should wait for Narim. He should catch up with us any day now.”

  “Lara must command it to say its name, just as she did with Keldar that first time,” said the Senai, pulling his cloak about his shoulders.

  Davyn was horrified. “But you said you almost—”

  “I wasn’t dying; Keldar was. I felt it from him. This time I’ll be ready. Let’s go.”

  “Wait!” I said as the Elhim followed the Senai out the door. “You might ask me—” But by the time I shouldered my armor bag, they were already halfway through the village. I had to shove my way through a clot of five nagging beggar children to catch them before they disappeared.

  MacAllister strode the half league through the stickery brush and stunted trees to the boundary of the lair as if the legions of the Ridemark were on his heels. While Davyn and Tarwyl scouted the path into the lair, the two of us crouched behind a wall of crumbling red sandstone and looked down on Fandine. Short bursts of sharp-tongued, blue-orange fire streaked across the darkening sky. Balefire, my clan called it, for its color and intensity told us that the kai was in pain—and thus likely to blast anything that wandered within a thousand paces of its snout. Wounded kai were exceedingly dangero
us.

  “I’m sorry you have to go,” said MacAllister softly, breaking his long silence as if he had read my thoughts. “If I could spare you, I would.”

  A kai screamed in the distance, the cry echoing from the red cliffs behind us and before us, and the Senai shuddered at the sound.

  “We can stop now,” I said. “Even if they were once as you believe, they are no longer. They’re killers. They have no minds. You’ve been deceived. Narim has—”

  “Has what?” His dark eyes flared, reflecting the blue-orange fire of the wounded kai.

  I couldn’t answer. “Wait and talk to him.”

  “No.” He pointed toward the spot at the cliff edge where Davyn had just reappeared and was beckoning us to hurry.

  We used the last of the daylight to creep down the steep path—if one could call a crumbling, boot-wide seam in the cliff face a path. At every step more of the red stone dissolved to powder under our feet or split into tiny pebbles that skittered down the sheer drop beside us. By the time we wedged ourselves into the too-small crack in the base of the path where Tarwyl waited, the only light was a fading red glow in the west. The lair itself lay in darkness.

  “A quarter of the way around the lair to your right, just below that cone-shaped spire,” said Tarwyl. “Just as I drew it. There are three Rider huts along the way; only the first two are occupied.”

  A thunderous bellow split the night, and the spout of fire lit the valley. MacAllister’s face grew so rigid that I thought his skin must split and show the iron beneath it.

  “They don’t wander ... the wounded ones?” said MacAllister, his eyes fixed on the bilious streaks fading in the sky.

  “No. Only if its Rider commands it. If it is not allowed to go to ground where it chooses, it will stay in one place until it heals or dies.”

  I was donning my armor as I answered him. MacAllister had, of course, not brought his. A worried Davyn started to speak, but another bellow—grinding, shrill, murderous—cut him off. By the time the echoes had died away, I had finished lacing my boots, and Tarwyl had given a small lantern to MacAllister.

  “I’ll carry that,” I said, jamming my helm over my hair to mask the last evidence that I was a woman. “You stay behind me, just out of the light.” I hung my coiled whip on my belt and patted my belt pouch to make sure my emergency gear was still in it. I didn’t want MacAllister to see what I’d brought. It might worry him. It might make him leave me behind.

  “The blessings of the One Who Guides go with you,” said Davyn. “We’ll be waiting for you right here.”

  MacAllister pressed his hand and Tarwyl’s, and then turned to me with a mocking bow. “To our doom, Mistress Lara,” he said, raising his dark eyebrows to pull his eyes wide open. “Shall we be the dragon’s saviors or its supper?” Then he motioned me to lead.

  A hot, stinking wind gusted through the narrow, steep-sided valley. Because the only kai in the lair were wounded, they could be held in tighter quarters. The tighter, the better, clan lore said. Perhaps because it was more like the caves to which the dragons would go to heal or die if they were allowed.

  We crept past vast pens crammed with goats that surged against the stout fences in waves of bawling terror at every blast of balefire. Beyond the herd pens were a few wooden sheds built up against the cliff walls: a cookshed, a smithy, a storehouse, a granary, a shelter for the women who cooked and served the Riders, and one for the drovers who kept the herd pens filled. A hospice for wounded Riders sat at the far end of the valley, far from the noisy, stinking pens. Lantern lights flickered in several of the buildings, and two slaves were hauling a heavy slops wagon slowly toward the pigsties.

  We held up for a moment in the shelter of a wood cart until the wagon had passed. A heavyset man took a piss outside the smithy and then went back inside, shutting off the orange glare flooding out of his door. A short distance beyond our position, a dry, rutted wagon road angled to the right into a narrow cleft in the cliff wall—the main entrance to the lair. The guard posts would be at the far end of it. Unless you were holding hostages, you didn’t need guard posts inside a dragon lair. To our left we could see the first Rider hut, its back to us. It faced the center of the lair where the kai were held captive by the ring of bloodstones. We would either have to cross the open expanse of the road behind the Rider’s hut, or risk the Rider—or a dragon—spotting us as we went on the darker, more dangerous front side of the hut.

  I chose the road. A mistake. No sooner had we stepped onto it than a party of horsemen came galloping out of the cleft—on us too quickly for us to dive back into our shelter. Two of them were Riders, very drunk from the sounds of their bawdy singing; two more were other clansmen equally drunk, each with a woman astride behind him. One horse carried two more women—drunk enough or stupid enough that they didn’t know how difficult it was for a drunken Rider to control his inner fire when he was mating. They would likely be dead before morning. The other two horsemen were servants carrying torches. The Riders’ horses reared as the party pulled into a milling knot no more than fifty paces from MacAllister and me, the women laughing and squealing like pigs. The men dismounted and turned the horses over to the servants. I thought we might escape notice in the confusion. But one of the servants lifted his torch high and called out, “Who’s there?”

  No time to think. No time to delay. I had to keep them away from us. I pulled out my whip and whirled about to face MacAllister, keeping my back to the Riders’ party. “On your knees,” I said quietly, “and do exactly as I say.” I cracked the whip on either side of him to drown out any protest he might make. Voices carried exceedingly well in a lair. Unfortunately mine was a woman’s voice—entirely inappropriate for one in Rider’s armor. “You must be my voice,” I whispered. “Tell them your name is Ger, and you’ve brought in an injured kai from Gondar and a Senai card cheat from Vallior. Say it like a Rider.”

  As I cracked the whip again, raising spouts of dust and dried mud, MacAllister dropped to his knees with a steel-eyed glare. “Stay away!” He screamed out the words I’d told him—remembering to use the old tongue and the very voice of besotted arrogance that would be expected. “I’ll take my pleasure with the Senai vermin undisturbed; then I’ll join you and see what revels can be found in this pitiful excuse for a camp.”

  Blast them, I thought. The clansmen stood watching, swilling from bloated wineskins while the women wrapped themselves obscenely around their waists.

  “We’re going to have to play it out,” I whispered as I kicked MacAllister sprawling and wrapped a thong of my whip about his wrists.

  He screamed out, “Never again, Senai. Never will you think to cheat a clansman of the Ridemark!” Then he struggled to get up, whispering back to me with the slightest edge of anxiety behind his smile, “As long as you don’t get to like this.”

  I kicked him again and stuck the point of my rapier under his chin.

  “Now what to do with you,” he snarled, then followed with a string of curses that I wouldn’t have imagined he knew. “Something fitting for a Senai donkey.”

  I coached him, and he played it well. Sheathing my sword and yanking on the whip, I stretched his hands over his head and dragged him away from the drunken party toward the wood cart. He helped by digging in his feet as if to get up and fight, but would propel himself forward so that it wouldn’t be too obvious that it wasn’t easy for me to drag him. Several times he stumbled onto his back, and I had to drag him on it until he could get purchase with his feet again. I dared show no mercy. When we had covered the distance to the wood cart, he dragged himself slowly to all fours, working to get his breath, while I pulled manacles and chain from my pack and dangled them high in the torchlight. The onlookers laughed and cheered and whistled.

  “Ask them if they approve,” I said. “Hurry. Keep them amused, and they won’t get involved.”

  “One moment.” He gasped; then he looked up and saw what I held. “Oh, gods ...”

  “Say it.”
/>   “So you approve?” he screamed, all the while shaking his head. Then, quietly, “No ... no ... I most certainly do not.”

  As the drunkards cheered, I kicked him flat again, stepped on his chest, and loosened the whip enough that I could lock the iron bands about his scarred wrists. “I don’t know any other way,” I said. Then, without looking at his face, I attached the length of chain to the rings bolted to the wood wagon. “We’ll go between them and the Rider’s huts, just like I’m planning to take possession of the empty one. It’s the only way.”

  It seemed to take two hours for MacAllister to drag the wood cart the fifteen hundred paces to the deserted Rider hut. The wagon was three-quarters loaded, heavy and cumbersome. Our audience cheered as we passed them by. I saluted with my sword and repeatedly laid the whip as close as I dared to the Senai. Once I grazed him on his cheek, and another time on his shoulder, ripping his tunic and drawing a smothered curse from him. He flinched dutifully with each crack, and I believed there was more truth to his groaning effort than he would care for anyone to know.

  Once we were past them, the onlookers seemed to remember their own plans and staggered toward the occupied Rider’s huts, calling out that I should come join them when I’d had enough of my vengeance.

  “Tell them to save you a woman,” I told MacAllister.

  But he was panting and heaving, and shook his head. “Can’t.”

  So instead I raised my sword again and whirled it in circles above my head. I didn’t let him stop until we reached the third hut, and even then I scouted the area thoroughly before I unlocked his bonds.

  He bent over, resting his head and arms on the side of the cart. “Thank the Seven, it wasn’t fully loaded,” he said.

  “We’ve got to get moving. The Riders and their friends were drunk enough to forget us, but the servants weren’t. They’ll ask about the new arrival.”