Dragon Venom (Obsidian Chronicles Book 3)

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  "We need a road for the wagon," Double pointed out.

  Arlian was forced to concede that these arguments were sound, and after further discussion tradition eventually prevailed.

  Thus the wagon, guarded by steel and silver and amethyst, took the familiar route—but it was not familiar at first. The Borderlands had changed. Magic streaked across the sky, the wind laughed and muttered, and after just three days' travel they found deserted villages. In one of them peculiar trees grew in the streets, short thick trees that seemed to have human feces in the bark and that writhed and rustled without any wind; Arlian suspected that these had once been the village's normal inhabitants.

  From that point on strange beasts stalked the nights, and marvels and wonders seemed to lurk around every corner. Flowers watched them pass with wide blue eyes, and birds spoke to them in several languages—one bright-plumbed creature followed them for a time, calling Arlian's name in his long-dead mother's voice. All of the travelers often glimpsed things from the corners of their eyes that were not there when looked at directly.

  Oddly, once they were across the old border, some eight days from Orange River, the chaos subsided and a semblance of normalcy returned.

  The villages they passed now were inhabited by brown-skinned people in flowing bright robes, people who spoke Man's Tongue with strange accents if they spoke it at all—but they were inhabited, and the people, however foreign they might appear, were human.

  Isein inquired once or twice whether anyone remembered seeing an Aritheian of Qulu's description passing through a year or so back, but received only shrugs in reply.

  "Nothing has changed here," Isein explained when Poke commented on the unremarkable appearance of this area. "These lands have the same magic they have always had. The magic here is no stronger; the difference is that a part of the dragons' magic has been freed in the Borderlands, not that the wild magic beyond the old border has grown.'"

  "But it seems so strange there," Poke protested. "Why should it be stranger than here?"

  "Because the magic there has only recently been freed, and has not yet found its proper form," Isein replied. "No one there has learned to tame it, and nothing has yet restrained it. In time, it will settle down . . . "

  If she had intended to say more, she did not get the chance; at that moment a roaring green monstrosity sprang from the roadside ahead, lunging toward the lead ox. Arlian had been walking nearby; his sword seemed to leap into his hand as he sprang to the animal's defense. Double, riding guard ahead, swung around as well, drawing his own blade, cursing himself for not having seen the creature as he passed.

  The two swordsmen dispatched it in short order, chopping it into twitching, bloodless chunks, but a stop was required to tend to four long gashes its claws had inflicted on one of the oxen.

  "It's no worse than before," Isein said, as she worked a quick healing spell, "but that doesn't mean it's safe. It has never been safe."

  Arlian grimaced at the reminder, but said nothing.

  A fortnight into the journey they passed the last village and began the climb into the Dreaming Mountains. On the third night thereafter the attacks began in earnest; the green thing had been only the first faint taste.

  Fortunately, most of the nightmares and monstrosities fled or crumbled or faded away when stabbed with good steel; a few burst like soap bubbles. Some that were not especially vulnerable to steel blades were driven off by the touch of the silver necklaces all four travelers wore, and after one especially close call Arlian pried some of the silver ornamentation from the wagon and looped it around the oxen's throats.

  The gelding now wore a harness trimmed with silver, rather than the plain leather that Arlian had used in visiting Pon Ashti and Tirikindaro—

  but that did not save it; on the fourth night in the mountains, while the travelers were slaughtering a swarm of venomous black rat-things on the other side of the wagon, something tore the poor beast's throat open, and it bled to death before help could come.

  Two nights later Poke lost two fingers off his left hand while fending off an insectile horror that shrieked like a woman when stabbed.

  The other two men dispatched the monster while Isein tended to Poke's wound; while the creature did not flee from cold iron, well-handled steel could still pierce its chitinous armor.

  Its blood was bright red. When it finally turned and fled, Double suggested pursuing it to finish it off, but Arlian, seeing the red blood and hearing the woman's voice, remembered an incident from his first passage through the Dreaming Mountains. He held Double back, and the beast escaped.

  That was the worst of it; five days later they came down out of the mountains and saw the black iron gates of the Aritheian town of Ilusali ahead. Late the following afternoon they arrived in Theyani, the Aritheian capital.

  There they finally received some word of Qulu, though hardly a satisfying report; he had arrived in good order over a year before, and departed on schedule. No news of him had been heard since.

  "What happened to him?" Isein demanded—but no one could tell her.

  It was all too easy to make unpleasant guesses, though.

  And then, for a time, the party disbanded. Isein sought out her own family, to re-acquaint herself with the affairs of her clan, to seek advice on Qulu's fate, and to share her concerns with others who had known and cared about him. Since the party was in a civilized land and under the protection of the House of Deri, Arlian and Isein no longer required guards; therefore Double and Poke were free of their duties. The two soldiers took the opportunity to relax, and to familiarize themselves with the fabled magical land of Arithei—most particularly with its women and its strange southern liquors. Poke alternated between inquiring fruitlessly after magicians who might be able to restore his lost fingers, and using their absence to gain the sympathy of the local female population.

  And Arlian spent his days talking to the greatest magicians and scholars of the House of Deri, and the House of Shalien, and the House of Peol, and even the House of Inde. He had not come this time to earn yet more of their best physicians away to Manfort as he had Oeshir and Lilsinir and Tiviesh and Asaf, nor was he interested in how the magicians created their spells, nor in the history of Arithei's occasional wizard-kings, nor in the nature of Arithei's defenses; he wanted only to know how magic could be bound up, as the dragons bound it, by something other than dragons.

  And none of them could tell him. In tact, much of what he had learned from the Blue Mage and the leech-god of Tirikindaro had been unknown to them, so he taught as much as he learned.

  Still, he did learn.

  "The essence of every natural creature is found in its blood," old Epheil, one of the leading scholars of the realm, told him as they sat cross-legged on the tiled floor of a tower room in the clan-house of Peol.

  "That is why cleansing the blood, rather than flesh or bone, transforms a dragonheart back to an ordinary man. We have studied this question extensively in the years since Oeshir's reports were first brought to us, and of course we knew a great deal about it from the wizards and magicians of old. We are certain of our conclusions. It is contamination of the blood that permits the creation of a new dragon or wizard, and it is this use of blood by the infecting magic that determines the consistent form of the offspring. Wild magic that inhabits the skin or flesh or any other thing than blood will spawn monstrosities, as we often see in the lands surrounding Arithei, and will commonly transform the affected host, rather than creating a new being."

  "Wizards are more or less human in form," Arlian said. "Dragons are not, yet they are born of human blood. How does this accord with your theories?"

  "This is still a matter of conjecture," Epheil replied. "It has been suggested that this is why the gestation of a dragon requires so very much longer than that of any other creature—the magic does not want to take the form being forced upon it, and the host's blood must first be altered, drop by drop, from human to dragon. Something in the venom causes this
slow transformation, and only when it has been completed can the magic take on its final draconic form."

  Arlian considered that for a long moment, then said, "Someone told me that dragons eat human souls."

  "We have no knowledge of this," Epheil said, meeting Arlian's gaze.

  "It may well be true."

  "If they do, then perhaps the first souls they eat are those of their hosts—perhaps, in fact, the taint in the blood gradually destroys the human soul, and this is why dragonhearts are incapable of human warmth." Unpleasant memories stirred. "And perhaps that is why, when a new dragon is born, its eyes hold something of its human parent—it has just finished eating that soul."

  "Perhaps."

  "And with the soul destroyed—that natural essence in the blood you spoke of—the dragon's form can prevail."

  "This would be consistent with my understanding," Epheil agreed.

  "But we are merely guessing."

  "So dragon venom is, perhaps, a sort of refined and constrained magic—it simultaneously attempts to transform its host into a creature of magic, as does the wild magic of the south, while being prevented from completing the transformation until every trace of humanity has been burned out of the blood."

  "Again, this is mere theory," Epheil warned. "Remember that dragon venom by itself is a virulent poison, and only in combination with human blood does it cause any transformation at all; there is clearly something more going on here than we know. Still, it is undoubtedly a very powerfully magical substance."

  "And is there any other known substance, any potion or elixir, that acts similarly? Perhaps we might learn by comparing . . . "

  Epheil shook his head. "I can think of nothing that causes so slow a process. There are potions that will transform a person into something else, either temporarily or permanently, as the Blue Mage transformed those squirrels you described, but these do not alter the underlying nature of a being, only its outward manifestation—as you saw, when the Blue Mage died the squirrels reverted to their natural form. This is a fundamentally different process."

  "I would prefer a transformation that left the underlying nature unchanged," Arlian said. "Could I perhaps hire a wizard to transform thousands of creatures in harmless ways, and therefore absorb a portion of the magic inherent in the Lands of Man?"

  "But you would be using the wizard's magic, imposed from without," Epheil pointed out. "There would be no inherent magic in your altered creatures. You could use only the magic the wizard already controls, and it would dissipate upon the wizard's death."

  "I have slain dragons that had created dragonhearts, and the dragonhearts did not revert to ordinary men and women."

  "A fundamentally different process, as I said. It is a quality of dragon venom that is unlike anything else with which I am familiar.*'

  "Dragon venom," Arlian mused. "Always dragon venom. What if there were some way to transfer the magic inherent in dragon venom to some other form?"

  "Then you would have your solution, I suppose—though you must be very careful indeed that this new form is no worse than the dragons."

  "What could be worse?" Arlian asked—but then he remembered some of the things he had seen in the Dreaming Mountains, and in the fields of Tirikindaro, and even in the streets of Pon Ashti. He grimaced.

  "Don't answer that," he said.

  The Failed Quest

  26

  The Failed Quest

  Arlian stayed in Theyani for a fortnight—long enough to convince himself that the magicians of Arithei did not have any easy solution for him. He learned a great deal of theory about the nature of magic, from Epheil and a dozen others, but no one could tell him what he wanted to know.

  He did learn that as he had suspected, magical spells and devices served to concentrate natural magic, and move it temporarily from one place to another—his magic-importing business had transported a quantity of magical energy from Arithei to the Lands of Man. The Aritheians, who had an immense surplus, had considered this a good thing, and had believed the natural magic of the Lands of Man so depleted that any increase would be harmless; Arlian, however, no longer thought it wise to transfer any sort of magic to the Lands of Man, and resolved to shut down his enterprise.

  No one could tell him how to remove magic from the Lands of

  Man, however, or how to bind it in a stable form other than dragons.

  Therefore at the end of that two weeks he began preparations for further explorations, and three days later he set out for Stiva, another land where men ruled and magic was extensively studied. Double and Poke accompanied him, as did an Aritheian named Uilieh he had hired as a translator; Isein stayed in Arithei, further re-acquainting herself with her homeland.

  Upon their arrival in Stiva a week later they were initially received with suspicion—the only northerners who had ever traveled to that land were traders, and Arlian had no banners, no displays, on his single half-empty wagon; he had brought nothing to trade save information, and the people of Stiva placed no great value on that- In the end Arlian found it necessary to strip a few ounces of silver and several pounds of iron from his wagon's protective devices to pay for food, lodging, and the knowledge he sought.

  He learned more of magical theory, some of it interestingly different from what he had been taught in Arithei, but still nothing immediately useful.

  "After all," as one Stivan magician said, and Uilieh translated, "if we could create stable and harmless magic, would we not have done so ourselves, and drained our own realm of its dangers, rather than living huddled behind wards and hexes and protective runes?"

  That simple statement of the obvious struck Arlian hard; he had somehow failed to consider that. Clearly, he was not going to have his solution handed to him on a silver platter, ready to apply to the Lands of Man; if such a solution were known, it would have been implemented somewhere, and it had not. In all the known world, from the western deserts to the Eastern Isles, only the Lands of Man were free of wild magic, gaunts, wizards, rogue magicians, stalking nightmares, and the like, and that distinction was due, it seemed, entirely to the presence of the dragons.

  But, he told himself, no one had ever before combined all the scattered knowledge of the southern lands. No one else had spoken with the master of Tirikindaro and the scholars of Arithei and the magicians of Stiva and a wizard like the Blue Mage, and put all that together. None of the southerners had studied the subtleties of northern sorcery—though, Arlian admitted privately, he had only scratched the outermost surface of sorcery himself.

  Lord Enziet had spent centuries studying sorcery and dragons, and had arrived at the secret of their vulnerability to obsidian; if he had ventured into the lands beyond the border, might he have learned that centuries sooner?

  Perhaps, and perhaps not—Arlian would probably never know. He did know, however, from his inherited notes, that Enziet had never sought an alternative to the dragons; he had not lived long enough to concern himself with that

  That problem was entirely Arlian's.

  He hoped very much that he would not need six hundred years, the length of time Enziet had taken to learn about obsidian, to find that alternative.

  He stayed a little over a month in Stiva—he needed longer than he had in Arithei because of difficulties with the language, and because he had not spent years dealing in Stivan magic, nor crossed the Desolation in company with a Stivan magician. His initial ignorance of Stiva was impressively complete, though he did his best to relieve it as swiftly and thoroughly as possible.

  In the end, though, he concluded that he had reached the point at which further gains would not be worth the investment of time and money. He had, he thought, learned all he could profitably learn of the Stivan understanding of magic. It might be that some missed tidbit, some obscure detail, held the answer he sought, but he did not care to spend years hoping to stumble across it. He found Poke and Double, loaded them and Uilieh back into the wagon, and headed west.

  The guards were happy
to go; the women of Stiva were far less cooperative than those of Arithei, their menfolk more protective and suspicious. Further, the only local liquor was a bitter wine neither of the soldiers cared for.

  From Stiva Arlian set out to Lur Dalaket, a land in the southern jungles that had never traded with the Lands of Man; he hoped that this would mean there were untapped insights there. Instead he found an unhappy huddle of primitive villages and runaway superstition where the natives were simply waiting for the next wizard who might choose to rule them and impose a semblance of order on their miserable existence.

  A week was more than enough time to sicken of the place and move on to Baratu, a land that, he discovered, had kept itself relatively free of wizards and the like by slaughtering anyone or anything suspected of harboring any magical taint. The result was a tiny and dwindling population living in an atmosphere so thick with formless magic in some places that Arlian found it hard to breathe; the air seemed to flicker constantly.

  From there, Arlian turned northward to Shei, where a council of thirteen wizards ruled over a reasonably healthy human population. No human magicians were permitted, nor were magical protections such as those on Arlian's wagon; he left the wagon and oxen, as well as his three companions, at the border while he ventured into the council's territory.

  The wizards were sufficiently civilized and curious to grant Arlian a brief and unsatisfactory audience, which was largely spent arguing over whether the Lands of Man would be better off ruled by wizards than by the current mix of humans and dragons. Arlian was relieved that the wizards eventually agreed to disagree, and made no effort to change his opinion with anything other than words.

  Still alone and on foot he crossed from Shei through the roadless jungles south of Skok's Falls to the city-state of Kaltai Ol, where the magicians had taken charge of their environment by learning spells that allowed them to enslave nightstalkers, which were then used to defend them from all other dangers. Arlian was initially intrigued by the concept, and wondered about the possibility of scaling the spells up to control dragons, until he discovered that the magicians had been unable to alter the nightstalkers' diet. The women of Kaltai Ol were kept perpetually pregnant to ensure a steady supply of surplus babies, whose brains were fed to the nightstalkers.