Dragon Weather

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  Arlian saw it clearly. Lord Dragon and his looters were stealing, and someone had to punish them for it. The three dragons had killed innocent people; someone had to kill them to make it fair. His mother had said there were no more dragons; Arlian wanted to do anything he could to make that belief come true.

  He had no idea how it might be done, no real hope of ever accomplishing it, but somehow he knew he must do something to fix it all—and he couldn’t if he were dead. His job would be harder if he were crippled by beatings.

  So, for now, he would do as he was told, and someday he would have his chance. Someday, he would find a way to repair this wrong.

  “This way,” he said, and he led the man in brown to where the village workshops had stood.

  4

  The First Journey

  It was surprisingly difficult to walk with his hands tied. Logically, Arlian didn’t see why it made much difference, but all the same he found himself stumbling and awkward much of the way down the mountain, and could only attribute it to having his hands bound behind his back, where he could not use them to help maintain his balance.

  His eyes stung with tears as he staggered along, and he did not know whether to attribute that to pain or grief or anger—or if it even mattered.

  His captors displayed no sympathy for his discomforts, but they were in no great hurry, so he was able to keep up without being dragged, and without being run over by the heavily laden wagon. He wondered whether they would put him in the wagon with the other loot if he collapsed and refused to walk.

  One of the looters, a woman called Dagger, glanced at him as he stumbled again. Arlian didn’t know whether she noticed his tears, but she deigned to address him.

  “You’re probably thinking that Fate’s been cruel to you, aren’t you?” she said. “You being sold into slavery, and all. But look at it this way—if we just left you there, all alone, what would become of you? If you didn’t want to starve you’d have to come down the mountain anyway, sooner or later, and beg in the streets—and if you did, you might have been caught by slavers anyway. And it’s not all bad. At least slaves know where their next meal will come from.”

  Arlian stared at her without speaking, his eyes drying.

  “And you may think it’s hard luck that your family all died,” the woman went on, “but you survived, didn’t you? There’s good and bad in everything, lad, if you know how to look.”

  Arlian didn’t say anything aloud, but his thoughts were clear.

  Good luck or bad didn’t enter into it. The dragons had chosen to destroy his village. The looters had chosen to scavenge in the ruins. They had chosen to do the terrible things they had done. They could have left the village alone. It wasn’t ill chance that had destroyed the village and carried Arlian into slavery; the destroyers did it on purpose.

  Fate had not been cruel. The dragons had been cruel. Lord Dragon had been cruel. The other looters had been cruel.

  And if Arlian ever had the chance to repay that cruelty, he would—but for now he would just go on as best he could, in hopes that chance would come. He blinked away his tears and stared silently back at Dagger.

  “Not speaking to us, eh?” she said. She shrugged. “Please yourself, then.”

  They stopped at one of the river towns that night, but Arlian saw almost nothing of it, and had no chance to speak to any of the townspeople. Before they passed the village gate he was gagged, his ankles bound, and he was thrown into the wagon, covered over with a blanket.

  He lay there, thinking miserably of his family and the monstrous injustice of it all, and didn’t notice when he fell asleep.

  In the morning he was too stiff to walk. After he collapsed twice in a dozen yards he was flung back into the wagon and left there, to bounce and bump helplessly as the wagon rattled its way along the muddy road—this stretch was not paved as the mountain road had been. His gag was removed after they had gone a mile or so, and his hands freed, so he could eat. He was given bread and water, which he consumed without tasting it; his hands were then tied again. No further attempt was made to get him to walk.

  This set the fashion for the rest of the journey.

  On the fourth day they stopped early in the afternoon, and Arlian was hauled out of the wagon and dumped unceremoniously on hard-packed earth. He looked up, and found himself meeting the gaze of a stranger.

  He had gotten to know the seven looters by face and voice, and had heard names—though not true names—for all of them; this man was not any of them. He was white-haired, fat, clad in gray wool and white linen with his beard halfway down his chest. He smelled of onions and sweat.

  “I’m asking twenty ducats,” Lord Dragon’s voice said.

  The stranger snorted. “Five,” he said.

  “Shamble, just toss him back in the wagon,” Lord Dragon said. “This man doesn’t want to be serious…”

  “Eight, then.”

  “Eighteen? Perhaps I might consider that.”

  “I said eight, not eighteen!”

  “Ah, you’re still wasting our time with your nonsense. Shamble…”

  “And what are you going to do with the boy elsewhere, my lord?” the fat man asked, turning his gaze away from Arlian, presumably to meet Lord Dragon’s eyes.

  “Oh, I think a handsome young fellow like this would have his uses almost anywhere,” Lord Dragon said. “I couldn’t possibly part with him for less than sixteen ducats.”

  “You’ll have to haul him a long way to get that much. I’ll give you ten.”

  “Perhaps, as a personal favor, I could settle for fifteen, though you’d certainly owe me a favor in return…”

  “Eleven.”

  “Shamble, look at the boy and tell me whether you think our friend here has gone mad to offer less than fourteen.”

  “I’m not one to say, my lord,” Shamble replied. He was one of the looters—the biggest of them, but not one of the brighter ones, judging by what Arlian had seen of them.

  “Eleven, I said,” the fat man said.

  “Twelve, and that’s my final offer.” Lord Dragon’s tone had shifted, become colder—he had tired of the banter, Arlian guessed. The fat man could hardly fail to notice the change.

  “Twelve it is, then,” he said, his tone noticeably less confident. “The money’s in the strongbox.”

  “Then let us brook no delay in opening this strongbox,” Lord Dragon said.

  The fat old man departed, leaving Arlian staring up at the sky—and at a cliff of yellow-brown stone.

  He could not move much—his hands and feet were tightly bound, and his neck horribly stiff from his mistreatment—but Arlian turned enough to see that he was surrounded by Lord Dragon’s six henchmen while the lord himself accompanied the old man to the strongbox. They were standing easily on stony ground, the wagon at one side. The cliff blocked out almost half the sky, dark against the bleached-out pale blue of a hazy summer afternoon, but Arlian could see no houses or shops, no sign of a farm or village where the fat man might live.

  He looked at the looters, trying to memorize their faces so that he would know them someday when he tracked them down.

  There was Shamble, big and stupid and vicious, eager to please Lord Dragon however possible.

  There was Hide, the man in the sleeveless leather coat who had pulled Arlian from the cellar. He had had little to say on the trip down the mountain to this place, and stood slightly apart from the rest.

  Cover, a tidy young man who had worn a vest and climbed down into the cellars, was carefully not looking at Arlian. He seemed uneasy.

  Stonehand, who had peered over the wall and first seen Arlian, was grinning at something the woman called Dagger was whispering to him.

  And Tooth, presumably called that because so many of her teeth were missing, was staring at Arlian with a crooked, unkind smile on her ugly face.

  “I’ll remember you all,” Arlian mouthed silently.

  Then he heard the returning footsteps of the others, Lord Drago
n and the fat old man, and he turned his head just in time to see Lord Dragon set a foot in his stirrup.

  “Come along,” he said.

  The six of them came, and a moment later the wagon rattled away amid a flurry of hoofbeats and shouted comments, leaving Arlian alone with the white-haired stranger.

  “Welcome to Deep Delving, boy,” the man said, prodding Arlian with the toe of a heavy boot. “I’d suggest you look at the sky while you can—you’ll never see it again.”

  Arlian stared silently up at that long white beard and wrinkled face.

  I will see it again, he promised himself.

  Then the fat man grabbed Arlian by one arm and hoisted him upright. Despite his girth he was no weakling; he lifted the boy as if he were made of straw.

  “Come on,” he said, breathing the smell of onions in Arlian’s face. “Let’s get you underground where we can take off those ropes without worrying about any silly attempts to escape.” Carrying Arlian easily under one arm, the old man marched along the cliff, and then into it, through a hidden doorway.

  Abruptly Arlian was plunged from the familiar world of air and sunlight into a broad, torchlit stone corridor, awash in shadows and smoke. Memories of the smoke-filled cellar where his grandfather had died flowered suddenly, and he began to struggle and thrash in unthinking panic.

  The fat man dropped him abruptly. Impact with the stone floor knocked the wind out of him, and his struggles weakened.

  The fat man stared down at him. “What’s wrong with you, boy?”

  “The torches,” Arlian gasped. With one final convulsive shudder he forced the fear away and lay still.

  The fat man did not so much as glance at the torches mounted on the walls; instead he kept his attention focused on the boy.

  “What about them?” he demanded.

  “My family,” Arlian said. “Our house burned, and they all died. I was trapped in the cellars.” He didn’t mention the dragons; he had no clear reason in mind why he should not, but it somehow didn’t seem wise.

  “And the torches brought it back?”

  Arlian nodded.

  “Well, that’s one fear you’ll get over,” the old man said. “At least, if you want to eat.” He stooped and picked Arlian up again and slung him over one shoulder, almost smashing the boy’s head against the stone ceiling in the process. Without further conversation he marched onward, down the long sloping passageway.

  Most of the tunnel was dark, with the torches spaced widely enough that at the midpoint between any two there was just barely enough light for Arlian to make out his captor’s feet in the gloom. After a couple of hundred yards the torches gave way to dim oil lamps, which were no better, and the darkness seemed to deepen as they descended. The width of the passageway varied; the fat man stayed close to the right-hand wall, where the lights were mounted, and while at times the left-hand side looked almost close enough to reach out and touch, at other times it vanished in the gloom, at least twenty feet away.

  Arlian was in no condition to make a close study of his surroundings, but he did notice, when they passed close by the lights, that the walls had not been built, but carved out of the living rock—he was being taken deep into the earth. The walls were rough yellowish stone, with occasional ribbons of gray laced through it. Here and there a bit of quartz glittered faintly in the poor light.

  Down into the earth … down where the dragons slept? He shuddered again.

  But no, he wasn’t being taken to the dragons. Lord Dragon had mentioned a mining company; he must be in a mine, a mine far deeper than the pits where the people of Obsidian had dug out the slivers of black volcanic glass that gave their village its name.

  This was no mere pit. This was nothing like the mines Arlian had visited before.

  Then the fat man stopped suddenly. From his position on the man’s shoulder Arlian could see the tunnel they had just descended, and the broad expanse of the man’s back, but nothing of what lay ahead. He had no idea why they had stopped.

  “Ho, Bloody Hand!” the man called. “I’ve got a fresh one for you!”

  Then Arlian felt himself being heaved off the fat man’s shoulder and tossed; the world seemed to wheel wildly about him, a mad patchwork of light and shadow and glimpses of stone and thick timbers and blackened ropes, and he found himself plunging down into a pit after all …

  But only for perhaps a second; then he had landed hard on a pile of rags, knocking the wind out of him.

  A young man was standing over him, looking down at him.

  “It’s just a boy!” he called.

  “He’ll grow,” the fat man’s familiar voice called back.

  “If we let him,” the young man said. He sighed. “You won’t get much work out of him at first, you know.”

  “That’s not my problem,” the fat man replied. “I’ll be back when the Gaffer gets here.”

  Then Arlian heard footsteps retreating up the stone passage.

  The young man glared down at him for a moment, then pulled a knife from his belt and reached down to cut the boy’s bonds.

  Freed at last, Arlian tried to sit up, but found himself too weak and stiff to manage it until the young man grabbed him roughly by one arm and pulled him upright.

  “Welcome to your new home,” the young man said.

  Arlian looked around.

  He was at the bottom of a deep round pit, dimly lit by three of the little oil lamps. Two black passageways opened off it, roughly at right angles to one another. The passageway by which he had arrived, however, was not one of them; that tunnel was on a higher level. Arlian could see now that he had been casually flung some fifteen feet or more off a ledge; had the huge pile of rags not been here he might well have been killed.

  Also at that upper level, in the mouth of the entry tunnel, he could see a complex of ropes, beams, and pulleys, and what appeared to be a large bin of some sort. All the ropes had been carefully tied up out of reach, he saw—there was no way to climb up out of the pit, no ladder, no steps, no dangling ropes.

  A row of four ugly little wooden carts stood along one side of the pit, full of gray rock. Somewhere in the distance Arlian could hear a clinking, rattling sound.

  “Where am I?” Arlian asked. “Who are you?”

  “You’re in a mine, half a mile from the town of Deep Delving,” the young man replied. “You’re here to dig ore. If you dig enough, you get fed; if you don’t, you starve. If you cause trouble…” He hefted a whip in one hand, the knife he had used to free Arlian in the other. “I can use whichever of these I think is appropriate to the occasion,” the man said. “Or my fists, or a club, or whatever other tool it takes to get the ore out.”

  “What ore?”

  “It’s a stone called galena,” the man said, waving at the row of carts. “It’s gray, darker than the limestone.” He then gestured at the walls; Arlian supposed that this meant the pale stone around them was limestone. “When it’s smelted it yields lead—and sometimes silver, which is what makes it worth the trouble.”

  Arlian stared at him for a moment, trying to think what else he should ask. This was all happening too fast, it was all too harsh, to take in properly.

  The young man did not wait to hear what else Arlian might have to say, however; he sheathed his knife and grabbed the boy by one arm, then gestured.

  “Get that lamp,” he said.

  Arlian obeyed, and held the lamp high as he was dragged into one of the dark tunnels opening off the pit.

  The clinking noise grew louder as the two made their way down the tunnel, through widened areas and past side-tunnels, until Arlian could see light ahead.

  Then the man released him and snatched the lamp away.

  “Go on and join them,” the man said. “They’ll tell you what to do.”

  Arlian hesitated, and the man shoved him forward with the hand that still held the whip. “Go on!”

  Arlian stumbled forward into the darkness, and tried to focus on the light ahead. He headed toward
it, and finally staggered into a relatively open area lit by several oil lamps, an area where half a dozen ragged, pale-skinned, long-bearded men were working—four of them were hacking at a wall of gray stone with picks, while the other two collected the broken pieces with wooden shovels and dumped them into a wooden cart that stood nearby. A second cart was pushed up against a wall, just below one of the lamps. The clinking Arlian had heard had been the sound of iron on stone.

  One of the loaders spotted him as he approached, and stopped his work; the other loader noticed, and stopped as well. In a moment, all six men had turned to stare at Arlian.

  “Fresh blood,” someone muttered.

  “They didn’t give him a pick,” another remarked.

  “Then he’s a loader,” a third said. “He can do the handwork and push the cart.”

  “He doesn’t look strong enough to push it!” a fourth protested.

  “Where am I?” Arlian asked.

  One man snorted derisively; another laughed.

  “You’re in the Old Man’s silver mine,” a third said—an older man who spoke his words oddly, with a singsong rhythm.

  “The Old Man? Who’s that?”

  “He’s who owns this mine,” the man with the peculiar accent said. “Now you know as much about him as we do.”

  “Was he the one who bought me and brought me down here?”

  The men exchanged glances and grins. “Now, how would we know?” one of them asked. “We didn’t see who brought you.”

  “A big fat man, who smells of onions?” Arlian asked.

  “Could be,” one miner admitted. “If he’s been eating onions.”

  The others laughed, but Arlian ignored that. “And the one with the whip…” he began.

  Expressions turned grim, and one man spat to the side.

  “Bloody Hand,” one miner said.

  “Is that his name?” Arlian asked, and immediately regretted it—how could it be a name?

  “It’s all the name he needs,” the miner replied.

  “Why is he called that?” Arlian asked, dreading the reply.