But the dragon had been so close to the old man that the venom would not burn, so close it had not time to ignite; instead it had struck Grandsir full in the face as a toxic spray. Some had burst into flame when it struck the hot ceiling or the back wall of the ladderwell, but the liquid that had hit Grandsir had remained venom, rather than fuel.
And if the stories were right, it was eating the flesh from his grandfather’s bones.
Arlian almost hoped Grandsir was dead, for his sake—but for his own, he hoped the old man still lived, and might somehow help them both survive.
Survival did not seem very likely for either of them, though. The smoke was growing denser, the roar of the flames louder, and Arlian thought the whole cellar might yet cave in upon him.
And that thick red trickle moved slowly down Grandsir’s cheek, and finally dripped down, the first fat drop landing squarely in Arlian’s open, gasping mouth.
3
Lord Dragon
The shock of that impact on his parched tongue, the indescribably vile taste, the unbearable stench, the corrosive burning that seemed to be tearing the lining from his mouth and throat, the knowledge of what was happening, was more than Arlian could bear; he fainted.
He awoke choking in the dark, coughing up slime, and in his convulsions threw his grandfather’s body off him; the ladder that had pinned them both down snapped free and rattled to one side, one rail broken off short.
Arlian rolled over and vomited up everything he could bring up, vomited until his chin dripped with stinking ooze and his elbows rested in a widening pool of acidic detritus. His eyes filled with tears, both from the agony in his gut and the awareness of utter disaster, the knowledge that his home and his family had been destroyed. He pulled himself clear, away from the corruption his body had expelled, away from the ladder and Grandsir, into relatively cool darkness and sweeter air. There he fainted again.
He was awakened again, after how long he did not know, by voices, by laughter. He blinked and lay still, trying to remember where he was, what had happened.
He was in the cellars, he remembered. He could see that he was still in the cellars, looking at the bottom shelf of one rack of preserves. Daylight filtered down from above, daylight thick with drifting dust.
He was alive—the fire had passed over him and the cellars had not fallen in.
He heard footsteps somewhere above, heavy footsteps that crunched as if walking on the black ash the volcano sometimes spewed.
Daylight in the cellars—the roof was gone. Arlian remembered the fire, the smoke, the heat. He remembered the dragons; he remembered the third one’s face when it peered into the pantry, its eyes huge and alien and knowing.
It had been the eyes that frightened him into stepping back and falling, far more than anything else. The fangs, the jaws, the dripping venom—he had hardly noticed those. He had seen only those great dark eyes, bottomless and terrifying.
He had fallen; he remembered that now. And his grandfather had fallen.
And Grandsir had been struck by the dragon’s acid venom.
Arlian sat up, moving convulsively. He gulped air, choked and gasping, and turned.
Grandsir lay beside him on the stone floor—or rather, Grandsir’s corpse lay there.
There could be no doubt that he was dead; the venom had eaten his flesh away, exposing bone in half a dozen places, from a patch of skull where his forehead should be to the protruding parallel curves of bare ribs above the blackened, ruined remains of his chest.
Arlian’s empty stomach contracted painfully. He had nothing left to bring up. He moaned, and blinked as his eyes filled anew with tears.
His grandfather was dead. His parents were gone, almost certainly dead. His brother, as well. His entire life had been destroyed, suddenly and swiftly, with no warning—at least, none beyond a spell of bad weather.
Something burned deep within him—not pain, not an emotion, but a strange sensation he had never felt before. He remembered how he had lain trapped while his grandfather’s venom-corrupted blood dripped into his mouth.
He moaned again, slightly louder.
The footsteps overhead stopped.
“Did you hear something?” an unfamiliar voice asked—not the voice of any villager, Arlian was sure.
Arlian could hear another voice respond, but could make out none of the words. He looked up, startled, and blinked the tears from his eyes.
Who was up there? He had assumed there were survivors, people he knew—but these voices spoke with an odd lilt, an accent unlike anything he had ever heard. Even the people who lived in the farms and villages down by the river did not sound like that.
The opening at the top of the ladderwell was larger than it should have been; wooden flooring, doors, and ceiling had burned away, and parts of the stone walls had tumbled. Arlian could see hazy blue sky, but not much more than that.
“From that chimney, maybe,” the first voice said.
Arlian swallowed, trying to think clearly despite the overwhelming grief and shock that filled his mind. There were strangers in the ruins of his family’s home—who were they? What should he do?
Two other voices spoke, and then the footsteps sounded again, moving closer. A moment later a man’s face appeared over the top of one of the stone walls, looking down at him.
“It’s no chimney,” the man shouted. “There’s a cellar down here! And people, and one of them’s alive!”
“Help,” Arlian called weakly. “Help me!”
“You wait right there, boy,” the man said, grinning down at him.
Arlian stared up at the man for a moment. That grin didn’t look quite right, somehow.
Then there was a series of thumps and crashes, and someone was leaning over the ruined remains of the pantry floor, looking down at him. It was a man, a man wearing a sleeveless brown leather coat despite the heat; he held an iron pry bar in one hand. His face and coat were smeared with soot; his hair and beard were black, so the soot didn’t show, but they were disheveled.
Arlian had never seen him before; whoever these people were, they definitely weren’t from the village. Perhaps, despite their odd speech, they were rescuers from the river towns? Arlian had only been down off the mountain two or three times in his life; perhaps he didn’t know as much about the river-folk as he thought.
An almost-cool eddy of air stirred Arlian’s hair, and he wondered how long he had lain unconscious; judging by that breeze the long hot spell, the dragon weather, had apparently ended at last. That could happen suddenly, but he feared he had slept for days or even weeks, and been left for dead by his family.
But the dragon weather had passed, and the dragons it had brought were gone; the worst was surely over.
“What’s down there, boy?” the stranger asked. “Is there anyone but you?”
Arlian glanced at his grandfather’s corpse, then swallowed.
“Just me,” he said.
“And what else? Is there treasure? Obsidian?”
Arlian blinked, confused.
“There’s cheese,” he said. “And preserves, and wine…”
“So you wouldn’t starve if we left you, then?”
“Don’t leave me down here!” Arlian shrieked.
The man frowned. “It’s not up to me, boy,” he said. “It’s Lord Dragon’s decision.”
Arlian’s jaw sagged, and he slumped back against the shelves. “Lord Dragon?” he said.
“Yes, that’s what we call him,” the man said.
“What we call him.” Arlian relaxed slightly; then it was a man after all, and not a dragon. For a few seconds there he had had nightmarish images in his head of one of those black dragons still here in the village, giving these people their orders. He had thought that perhaps all the dragons had awakened from their slumbers and come to reclaim the Lands of Man and restore their ancient empire.
But it was just a man.
Arlian remembered what his parents had told him, how it was the custom many pl
aces not to use real names in the ancient tongue, but common words—Lord Stick, Lady Flower, or the like.
But who would dare call himself Lord Dragon?
Just then the man straightened and turned away from Arlian, and spoke to someone Arlian could not see. The boy was unable to make out the words, but the voice answering was cold and deep.
Then the two men, the one in the pantry and the one peering over the broken wall, both vanished. Arlian called, “Hey! Where are you?”
“Shut up, boy,” said that cold, deep voice.
Arlian shut up.
If they left him it wouldn’t be all that bad, he told himself. He did have plenty of food, and eventually he could get the ladder back in place, or use the shelving to climb out.
Who were these men? What were they doing here? They weren’t rescuers of any sort, from their behavior.
And then two men appeared where the pantry had been, the man in the brown leather coat and another in a smoke-stained canvas vest; the one in the vest was carrying a coil of rope. They were stepping carefully—Arlian guessed that the pantry floor was largely burned away, and they were wary of falling through.
Then the coil of rope was flung down into the cellars, one end still secured somewhere out of sight; the man in the vest grabbed hold of it and lowered himself cautiously down, carefully avoiding stepping on the gory corpse at the foot of the ladder well.
At the bottom he stopped and dusted off his pants as he looked around. He grimaced at the sight of Grandsir’s remains, then beckoned to Arlian. “Come on, lad,” he said. “We’ll get you out of here.”
Arlian scrambled to his feet. “Thank you!” he said.
The man picked him up and hoisted him, and Arlian stretched out his hands; the other man, the one in the leather coat, caught them and hauled. A moment later Arlian was standing in the ruins of his family’s kitchen.
He looked around in horror.
The walls and roof and most of the furnishings were gone save for scorched, fallen beams and drifted ash; the stone floor was strewn with debris. The rest of the village had fared no better; Arlian looked out on a blasted, blackened wasteland, scoured of every sign of life, as dead as the crater at the mountain’s peak. No structure still stood any higher than his head; the fragmentary walls of the pantry were among the tallest remaining.
A strong wind was blowing, carrying away lingering dust and smoke and heat. The air was still warm, but no longer thick and hot.
Half a dozen people were moving through the ruins. Behind Arlian, the man in the leather coat was talking to the man in the canvas vest; nearby, the man who had peered over the wall was poking through the crumbled remains of Arlian’s parents’ bedroom. Three other people, a man and two women, were scattered about the village on foot, and one was seated upon a horse in the little plaza at the center of town, overseeing everything. Over at the head of the path down the mountain stood a wagon, unattended at the moment, with a pair of draft horses in the traces.
Arlian had never seen a horse-drawn wagon before; that established beyond question that these people were not from the vicinity of the Smoking Mountain. Around here wagons were pulled by oxen; no one would waste horses on such a task.
“Where is everybody?” Arlian asked, his voice unsteady. His eyes were wet again, stinging with lingering smoke and tears.
The man on horseback turned to stare at him. Arlian stared back, and started trembling.
This must be Lord Dragon, he realized, and the man’s intense wordless stare did indeed remind Arlian of the expression he had seen on the face of the dragon that killed Grandsir.
The horseman was finely dressed in black trimmed with elaborate gold embroidery, from tall leather boots to the dashing, broad-brimmed hat cocked to one side and trailing golden feathers down behind one shoulder. His face was thin and dark, and his right cheek, the one partly concealed by the hat, was heavily scarred—old, ugly scars that looked as if a handful of flesh had once been ripped away and left to heal untreated. He wore no beard, an affectation Arlian had heard of but never seen before, and his mustache was trimmed to a narrow, curving black line. A black scabbard slapped against one of his thighs and the horse’s flank, and Arlian realized that the man carried a sword.
Arlian had never seen a sword. Only lords and professional guards carried swords, and the village had had neither.
This black-garbed man was clearly an actual lord.
“Come here, boy,” the horseman said in a cold, deep voice that Arlian recognized, the voice that had told him to shut up.
Hesitantly, Arlian picked his way across the kitchen floor and out into the village street, until he stood by the rider’s boot, looking up at the scarred face.
“Your village is dead,” the horseman said. “Don’t get your hopes up that your friends or family might still live. Dragons allow no escapes. Unless there are other cellars or tunnels, you are the only survivor.”
Arlian could not find a reply.
“We’re counting skulls, when we find them,” the rider said. “We may miss some, but you’ll know that most of them died, at the very least. Take my word for it, boy—they all died. One survivor is a miracle; two would be impossible.”
Arlian felt tears running down his cheeks, but still couldn’t speak.
“Now, do you know where any valuables might be? Where was the chief workshop? I have uses for obsidian back in Manfort. Or perhaps your village sorcerer might have had a few precious possessions?”
“I don’t know,” Arlian managed to say. His voice was a husky whisper.
The horseman frowned. “You don’t know where they worked the black glass?”
Arlian pressed his lips tight to keep from wailing and shook his head.
“Hmph.” Lord Dragon looked up and scanned the ruins quickly. Arlian dropped his gaze, and a teardrop rolled down his nose and dropped to the dust at his feet.
His family was dead—his mother, his father, Korian …
And Grandsir, of course. He had seen Grandsir’s body and knew beyond question that the old man was dead. The other deaths didn’t seem real yet, but he had seen the house, had seen the village, had heard Lord Dragon’s words.
And who was this Lord Dragon? Arlian looked up again, and as he did caught sight of a sack lying by the horse’s front hooves. He turned and glimpsed part of its contents through the open top—and recognized some of the items.
Old Gernian’s golden plate, now smeared with wet black ash but still unmistakable. Beronil’s crystal cups, handed down in her family for a century or more. The obsidian clock face Kashkar had been working on.
They were all thrown in together, and Arlian suddenly realized who Lord Dragon and his men were.
Looters. Human vultures, come to pick clean the bones the dragons had left.
He looked up, and his eyes met Lord Dragon’s gaze.
The horseman’s eyes were deep and dark, sunken in their sockets, with dark brown iris and almost no whites visible. They were cold and empty eyes that seemed to be studying Arlian as if he were no more than a stone in the path.
“What’s going to become of me?” Arlian asked.
“Unless you have rich kin somewhere who might pay a ransom,” Lord Dragon replied calmly, “I believe we’ll sell you. You look strong enough, and I know a mining company that can always use another strong back.”
“But I’m not a slave!” Arlian protested.
“You are now,” Lord Dragon replied, in a voice like the boom of the warning bell that now lay broken and half melted a hundred yards away.
Outrage welled up in Arlian’s heart. He had done nothing wrong; he had been born free, and did not deserve slavery. “But I’m…”
“You’re ours, by right of salvage,” Lord Dragon said, cutting him off. “This village and everything in it has been abandoned, and so, by ancient custom, belongs to whosoever first claims it. I am claiming it—and thereby, I claim you.”
“But…”
“Now, boy, unless you
have something to offer me in exchange, I’ll hear no more argument. You’re mine, and this village is mine.” Lord Dragon straightened in the saddle. “Do you have anything to offer me? Are there hidden treasures, perhaps? A secret cache in that cellar of yours?”
“No,” Arlian admitted.
“But you do know where the workshops were, I’m sure. Now, will you tell us readily, or must we beat it out of you?”
Arlian hesitated, and was suddenly aware that the man in the brown leather coat had come up behind him and was standing not a yard away.
“I’d tell him,” the man said.
Arlian hesitated, looking from Lord Dragon to the man on foot and back. He glanced at the bag of stolen valuables, at the horse standing placidly, at the long slim sword on Lord Dragon’s left hip and the long heavy knife on his right, and at the merciless calm of Lord Dragon’s expression.
“I can show you,” Arlian said.
He had no choice.
It was not that he feared a beating, or even death—if Lord Dragon killed him at least it would be over, and he would not be facing the prospect of a life spent laboring in the mines somewhere.
No, it was that if he died, he could never do anything to fix what had been done here.
The dragons had swept in and destroyed everything, slain everyone, for no reason; no one in the village had ever harmed or threatened them in any way. No one there had deserved to die—but they had died all the same.
And this man, this Lord Dragon, had no right to come up here and claim everything as his own. He had done nothing to earn this place, he had taken no risks, he had not sweated and labored to wrench the black stone from the mountain and shape it to human use. He had not sired Arlian, nor raised him, nor even purchased him, yet he now claimed him as mere property.
It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. And it was Arlian’s duty, as the sole survivor of those who had been wronged, to fix it, to make it better somehow. His parents had taught him that since he was a baby—wrongs had to be put right somehow.
Dragon Weather Page 3
