Dragon Venom (Obsidian Chronicles Book 3)

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  How can you not fear these? Everything that lives fears death!"

  Arlian turned out empty palms. "I do not," he said.

  The Mage, once again the size of an ordinary woman, gestured; the squirrel-apes released Arlian and stepped away, and the wizard drifted nearer. Glancing down, Arlian noticed that she apparently had no feet, or at any rate none that extended below the hem of her gown; she was floating a few inches above the paving stones. He was almost certain he had seen feet before, feet in blue velvet slippers, but there was no sign of them now.

  "Yet there are things you want," she said. "Things that you need, things you urgently desire."

  "Indeed there are," Arlian agreed. "And those that are not simply impossible often contradict one another. I want the dragons destroyed, yet I do not want the Lands of Man to be overrun with the wild magic that prevails elsewhere. I want my friends to be safe and well, yet I endanger them constantly by my actions in opposing the dragons. I want justice, yet I know that true justice is impossible in this life, that justice for one is cruelty to another."

  "I want the impossible, too," she said, hanging a few feet away. "I want to be what I am, the mightiest of wizards, and yet I want to live forever—and wizards cannot. We are creatures of chaos and change, of death and renewal—so I must die. If I must die, I want to not fear it so.

  There are things I want, and if I die, I will never have them. If you die, here and now, you will never have your revenge, never destroy the dragons, never find justice for your family—do you not dread such a thing?"

  "My lady," Arlian said, "I have never truly believed I could have justice, and I have learned that revenge is not enough. To destroy the dragons would be satisfying, but it would lay the Lands of Man open to you and your kind, and can you honestly say that would be an improvement for the ordinary villager or townsman? I will never have what I want, regardless of whether I live or die. I have accepted that."

  "Then why do you live? Why do you bother? Why did you not allow the assassin to strangle you, to squeeze the life from you?" Her hands moved uneasily, and Arlian suspected she was on the verge of blasting him, as she had the spy.

  He did not want to die, but he had no clever answer to give her, and simply spoke the truth.

  "Because I have made promises," he said.

  "Merely that?"

  "Merely that. That, and perhaps a lingering hope that things can be better than they are, that while I cannot ever fully achieve my goals, I may yet achieve something,

  "Other than life itself, I have achieved my goals in this life," the wizard said. "I have done as I pleased; I have taken Pon Ashti and made it mine, as I did a dozen other realms. I have cast down those who opposed me, and exalted those who honored me. I have shaped the world around me to suit my whims. I have no unmet goals, save my own preservation.

  Should I then simply allow myself to die?"

  "This is surely something you must decide for yourself," Arlian said.

  "I cannot say what a wizard should do; I have quite enough to do in remembering how to be human."

  "Perhaps I should die now, and get it over with, rather than live with fear."

  Arlian hesitated. "Can you die whenever you wish?"

  She laughed. "Not by wishing for it, but there are things that can destroy me."

  "Iron? Silver?"

  "No, neither of those—those are the banes of air and darkness, and I am a creature of earth and fire. I could scarcely have taken Pon Ashti if iron could harm me! A steel blade will shatter my illusions, reverse my transformations, for I weave those of the air around us, and for that reason I forbid such weapons in places where my creatures dwell, but no mere metal can harm me. Your sword, if you had it here, would pass through me without leaving a mark—or if I preferred, rebound from my flesh as if from stone."

  The mention of earth and fire, air and darkness, stirred certain memories in Arlian.

  "But there are weapons that can hurt you?" he asked.

  "There are indeed," she said. "No wizard is truly indestructible, though I am more nearly so than most."

  Arlian reached into his blouse and pulled out his black dagger—

  though even as he did he was unsure of the reason for his action.

  "Would this be one such weapon?" he asked.

  She stared. "A knife? How did you bring a knife . . . "

  " T i s neither steel nor silver," Arlian interrupted. "Your creature said nothing of glass."

  "Glass?" She drifted forward. "What sort of glass?"

  At that moment Arlian's thoughts seemed to rush forward at impossible speed, despite the crushing pain in his head. He knew the Blue Mage had not deliberately harmed him, that there were still things she could teach him, but she was a wizard, unpredictable and deadly, and had slain dozens, perhaps hundreds, of innocent citizens of Pon Ashti—

  not to mention the assassin-spy. She deserved to die, and the weapon he held might be capable of killing her.

  Arlian knew he would never have a better opportunity; he lunged, thrusting his right arm out while he stepped toward the Blue Mage, throwing all his weight onto his right foot, pushing himself into full extension and driving the obsidian dagger forward.

  The black blade plunged into her chest as if she were no more than a shadow.

  "Oh," she said, looking down. "Obsidian . . . "

  And then light and movement burst forth, flinging Arlian backward; the world seemed to whirl about him in a tangle of blueness and darkness and torchlight, and then he slammed against a fountain, his left foot tangled in a vine, and he tumbled sideways. Wind whickered and swirled, and a blue and orange light flickered.

  Dazed, Arlian struggled to right himself, and finally managed a sitting position.

  The Blue Mage was gone. The blue glow that had heralded her

  presence was gone. The stars above shone white and clear; the torches on the walls flamed yellow and red.

  A squirrel stood in the nearest doorway, looking about in confusion, and another scampered up the palm tree. The assassin's corpse still lay slumped against the far wall of the little courtyard.

  Arlian's headache was fading, replaced by the pain of various bumps and bruises and a soreness in his neck where the spy's cord had pressed.

  Bracing himself on the fountain and a flowering shrub, he pulled himself upright.

  His hands were empty, he noticed. He looked over toward the spot where the Blue Mage had been, and saw that slivers of black glass were strewn across several square yards of pavement.

  He looked at the squirrels.

  The Blue Mage was gone. Her magic had died with her.

  He was unsure just what had happened. Perhaps the obsidian had killed her, as obsidian thrust into a dragon's heart would slay; perhaps her time had arrived quite coincidentally at the instant he struck. Her last word might have been his name, or might have meant she recognized the material stabbing into her—he supposed he would never know which.

  And there were so many other unanswered questions! The Blue

  Mage had been ruthless and erratic and unpredictable—was that inherent in the nature of wizards, or was it just her? Had her knowledge of her own impending death helped to drive her to such a state? She had been unique even among wizards in her blue radiance—what had that actually signified, if anything?

  If it had been his knife that slew her, would obsidian kill any wizard, or had that been a peculiarity of the Blue Mage?

  Could wizards be controlled? Could the magic of the Lands of

  Man be bound up in a few wizards, rather than in the dragons, and the wizards constrained not to harm anyone? Did wizards eat souls, as Lord Zaner had told him the dragons did? If so, they would be no improvement.

  Or perhaps a diet of human souls was what gave the dragons their longevity, and it was only because the southern wizards had not learned this that they died after no more than a human lifetime. Arlian had no desire whatsoever to see a wizard test this theory.

  Was ther
e perhaps some way to bind the magic into something

  inanimate? Could obsidian perhaps be enchanted to absorb it?

  Need there be magic at all? Was there no way the magic could be destroyed altogether, or at least reduced to harmless levels? Arlian had wanted to ask her that. Isein had not thought it possible, but the Blue Mage might well have known secrets not given to an Aritheian magician.

  He looked at the dead spy, the man who had hoped to trade Arlian's life for a dose of dragon venom. Did the Dragon Society have other agents in the Borderlands? Could they, too, be seeking greater knowledge of the nature of magic?

  Was it even true that the deaths of all those dragons had been what allowed the creatures beyond the border to press northward? Could the dragons have somehow deliberately withdrawn their protection to provoke the Duke into making peace? Had Arlian been deliberately lured south in hopes that assassins here might be more successful than those in the north?

  Somehow, that seemed too baroque for the dragons or the Society.

  Enziet might have arranged it, if he still lived, but Enziet was unquestionably dead—Arlian had seen the man's heart lying lifeless on the stone. And those eighty-eight dragons were just as unquestionably gone, so the loss of draconic power was in all probability real.

  The Blue Mage had called the Lands of Man by their old name, the Dragon Lands, a name the people of the Duke's realm had rejected seven centuries ago; she had clearly believed that it was the dragons and only the dragons that defined the borders that excluded her.

  But she had lived only fifty or sixty years; how had she known what she knew? Was it inherent in her nature as a wizard, or had she learned it during those fifty or sixty years?

  Fifty or sixty years, no more. Until now, Arlian had not known that wizardly lifespans were so brief. The sorcerers of the Dragon Society considered seventy years the minimum necessary to really master the arcane arts—but then, sorcerers were human, and wizards were not.

  There were other wizards out there, dozens of them—an entire

  council of them ruled the land of Shei, for example. Perhaps they had accumulated other knowledge that a solitary creature like the Blue Mage had not.

  And there was the thing in Tirikindaro . . .

  Arlian frowned, and looked down at the brittle shards of his knife.

  Whatever it was that ruled Tirikindaro had been there for centuries, or at least so the stories claimed. If it was a wizard, then either it had found some way of surviving much longer than the norm, or it was not a single creature at all, but a succession of them.

  More likely it wasn't a wizard at all, but something else, something that lived much longer—maybe not as long as a dragon, maybe not even as long as a dragonheart, but far longer than a wizard or an ordinary man.

  There were those who said it was a god. Arlian was not sure what that meant; what was a god, really? Was a being that lived in the material world and reigned over a physical kingdom a god? That did not seem right. Certainly the dead gods Arlian had always prayed to, the gods that had once watched over the Lands of Man and might still protect it in some fashion, were not the same as the thing in Tirikindaro.

  God or not, that being was a tyrant, as everyone knew; the people of Tirikindaro lived as slaves, sweating their lives away in hard labor, dressed in rags or less, eating only when and what their ruler permitted them. It hated the sun, and Tirikindaro was therefore perpetually shadowed by thick unnatural clouds.

  A long-lived magical being that loathed sunlight and could alter the weather to accommodate that hatred—that was much like a dragon, really. But the thing in Tirikindaro was no dragon.

  Nor, apparently, was it a wizard.

  Arlian did not want to allow either dragons or wizards to dominate the Lands of Man, nor did he want to see his fellow men enslaved—but was the thing's tyrannical nature inherent? Alight a more beneficent version be created? Could a dozen or a hundred such beings perhaps replace the dragons as the manifestation of the magic of the Lands of Man, and do so benignly?

  There was nothing more of what he sought to be learned in Pon Ashti, that was clear—the Blue Mage had tolerated no rivals and accepted no comrades, and with her death the city was free of magic, if only for a moment. Arlian saw no reason to linger within the walls. He studied the exits from the courtyard, and eventually decided that one of the four was the passage by which he had entered; he took a torch from its bracket and made his way back down the corridor.

  The rustlings were gone; the damp odor had faded away. There was no trace of the red-and-black demon that had guarded the entrance, nor of the ape-things; the forecourt was deserted.

  The crystal gate was standing open, but he did not want to leave anything behind; he turned aside and conducted a quick exploration before leaving the palace. He found his sword belt, knife, and purse in a small side chamber and restored them to their usual places, and only then did he march back out into the night-shrouded city.

  The dark streets were largely deserted, and he made his way unim-peded to the most southerly of the four bridges across the Darambar.

  There he looked southward, at the water steps.

  The water's glow as it flowed over the stone was faint and uneven; on the previous nights of his stay it had been smooth and bright. The women and children who worked and played there by daylight were gone, but a few groups of men stood in the ankle-deep water, talking among themselves. A few looked up at him, their attention drawn by the light of his torch.

  "Your attention, good people!" he shouted, in his best commanding-officer bellow.

  More of the men fell silent and looked up at him.

  "The Blue Mage is dead!" he called. "The palace stands vacant, and the city is yours once again!"

  That said, he turned and proceeded across the bridge. He had delivered his message, and saw no reason to elaborate needlessly, nor make suggestions. The city of Pon Ashti was not his own.

  He ignored the bustle behind him, the shouted argument and hurrying feet and wild splashing, as he made his way through the streets to Twilight's home.

  When he rode out the gate the following morning the news had

  been confirmed and had spread everywhere, and there were vigorous debates under way on every street corner as to the ideal composition of the city's new government. No demon guarded the gate, no squirrel-apes roamed the streets, and the shadows lay where the sun cast them—

  but the water of the Darambar sparked and glittered at the roadside, and three-eyed fish watched him solemnly from just below the surface.

  23

  Under the Tyrants Heel

  Under the Tyrant's Heel

  You're mad," Isein said.

  "Yes, I know," Arlian agreed, as he checked the leather ties holding his supplies on the gelding's back. He was reasonably sure he had removed every trace of silver from his packs; the metal was not permitted in Tirikindaro. Iron could be carried in, so long as it was also carried back out.

  He had arrived safely back in Orange River two days before, and was preparing to depart again—and once more, he intended to travel alone.

  "No, my lord, you are mad," Isein insisted. "Genuinely insane."

  He tugged at the strap. "Yes, Isein, I know. I went mad when I was eleven. I have never said otherwise."

  "Arlian, this is different. You have always been obsessed with your vengeance, and you have always been daring and fearless, but this . . . "

  Arlian turned to look at her. As best he could recall, Isein had never before called him by his true name. "How is it different?" he asked.

  "This is Tirikindaro"

  "Isein, I survived a dragon attack when I was just a boy, then became the first man in recorded history to kill a dragon. To prove that was no mere fluke, I then slew fourscore more in their own lairs. I now appear to have slain the Blue Mage as well, and have emerged unscathed from that adventure. I have fought a dozen duels and survived, if not won, them all. I have survived more attempted assassinations than I
can count. I have crossed the Dreaming Mountains alone, and survived the Desolation more than once. I have fought bandits and monsters and wizards and Manfort's finest swordsmen. What is Tirikindaro that makes it any madder to approach than all the rest?"

  "It's a god, Arlian. And it's as mad as you are."

  He stared at her for a moment, then turned back to the horse. "The gods are dead, Isein," he said. "I don't know what the thing in Tirikindaro is, and it may indeed be mad, but I doubt it is any sort of god."

  "The gods of the Lands of Man are dead, or so you all say, but this is the god of Tirikindaro."

  "Your origins are showing," Arlian replied. "You grew up with this thing just across the mountains, so near that sometimes you could see its magic in the sky; childhood fears are strong. I grew up on the Smoking Mountain, hundreds of miles from here, and do not share those fears.

  Whatever it is, even if it is a godling of some sort, what can it do to me that a dragon could not?"

  "Anything it wants to. Any ghastly thing you can imagine."

  "And is that any more than the Blue Mage could do?"

  "Yes!"

  Arlian stopped his work, closed his eyes, and sighed.

  "I'm not going to fight it," he said. "I bear it no ill will—well, no, I lie; I do think its tyranny over its people an evil thing that should be ended. Aside from that, however, I do not hate it, I do not seek any sort of vengeance against it; I merely wish to speak to it, ask a few questions."

  "And if an ant crawls up your arm, do you worry about whether it means you harm or was simply exploring, or do you flick it aside, perhaps squash it, without troubling yourself about its motives?"

  "Ants do not ask questions in any tongue a man can hear; surely, the thing in Tirikindaro can hear its supplicants?"

  "When it bothers to listen, perhaps."

  He sighed again. "However mad you think it, Isein, I am going to Tirikindaro to speak to the ruler of that land. I do not expect you to accompany me, and I have ordered Double and Poke not to, but I am going."

  "I thought you came south to go to Arithei, not Tirikindaro!"