The Blood of a Dragon loe-4

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The first crossroads had almost fooled him; one branch was so small, nothing more than a trail, really, that at first Dumery thought there were only three roads at the intersection.

  The man had been quite definite about the order, though-fork, fork, crossroads, crossroads, fork, fork.

  There was an inn at the second crossroads, but Dumery didn’t stop; it was hardly past midday.

  He also ignored various markers along the way; they were all written in Sardironese, which used similar runes to Ethsharitic, but which Dumery could not otherwise read. He recognized the name “Aldagmor” on most of them, now that the tavern girl had alerted him to where he was, but the rest was just gibberish as far as he was concerned.

  He passed houses, as well, but didn’t stop to investigate any of them.

  Since leaving the inn where he had breakfasted the road he followed had run more or less parallel to the ridges, rather than across them; that made traveling significantly easier.

  The slopes were getting steeper, though-much steeper.

  And the weather was growing steadily colder, which seemed almost unnatural. It was spring, after all-the weather was supposed to be warming up.

  The hills undoubtedly had something to do with it, as well as the fact that he was well north of Ethshar.

  At sunset he still hadn’t found the last two forks, nor an inn. His generous breakfast was long past, and his gnawing hunger had returned. All the same, he had little choice but to curl up by the roadside and try to sleep.

  He tried to think of somewhere, anywhere, that he could find food, but nothing came to mind. It had been hours since he had passed a house with a garden, and when he had he hadn’t seen anything that was even close to ripe yet. He still hadn’t found any of the nuts or berries that always seemed to be at hand in the stories, either.

  Well, he had always thought most of those stories were lies. He lay there listening to his stomach growl.

  Eventually, exhaustion overcame hunger.

  He was awakened well before dawn by a thin, cold drizzle. He sat there, huddled and soaking, until there was enough light to see, and then began stumbling slowly onward, always watching carefully for even the faintest paths.

  The rain had ended, the clouds had dispersed, and the sun was finally peering over the mountains when he passed a rather decrepit inn; he was tempted to stop, but remembering that his total fortune was down to a mere two bits, and that Kensher Kinner’s son might be just a few steps ahead of him, he reluctantly forged onward.

  He found the third fork around midday, and turned left, up into the mountains.

  After that the journey got worse. The road ran up and down slopes steeper than Dumery had ever imagined climbing, and often wiggled so much on the way up or down that he felt as if he were constantly doubling back on himself. On occasion he found himself looking straight ahead at the tops of mature pine trees, trees rooted at the base of a cliff or drop-off, sixty or seventy feet down.

  The mountains he had seen in the distance back by the river were no longer distant at all; in fact, he wasn’t sure whether the hills around him were merely hills, or whether he was actually among the mountains now.

  He certainly wasn’t up among the highest peaks, which still towered to the east, but the slopes he was climbing were long and steep enough to qualify as mountains by most definitions. Small mountains, perhaps, but mountains.

  He passed very few houses along this stretch, and those few were all set well back among the trees, doors closed and windows shuttered. He didn’t inquire at any of them.

  He might have tried robbing a garden or orchard if he had seen any, no matter how unripe the fruits might be, but he saw none.

  His boots, which were soft-soled city boots that had lasted longer than he had really had any right to expect, finally began to give out around midafternoon-the shredded left sole pulled loose from the stitches that had held it, so that it hung down and flapped awkwardly with each step he took.

  After tolerating this for the better part of a mile he gave up, took the boots off, and tucked them in his belt as best he could. Then he trudged on, barefoot.

  The sun was behind the treetops in the west when he reached the fourth and final fork.

  Another of the stone markers was set up at this fork, the first one he had seen in hours, but as it was entirely in Sardironese he couldn’t make out any of what it said. He ignored it, and took the right fork.

  The left fork was plainly the main trail-it could no longer honestly be called a road, even in comparison to the paths he had followed thus far. The right fork was little more than a trace.

  It led almost directly up a mountainside-unquestionably a mountainside, this one, and not a hillside-and Dumery followed it as best he could, but he had not yet reached the peak when the fading sunlight made it impossible to proceed. He was certain he was nearing his goal, the lodge or cabin whence Kensher based his dragon hunts, but stumbling on in the dark would be too dangerous. He could fall over a cliff all too easily.

  Reluctantly, he settled in for the night, curling up on a pile of fallen pine branches, all too aware that he hadn’t eaten in almost two days. He could hardly hope for an inn up here in the wilderness, of course, and in fact he had seen no human habitations of any kind since a few miles before the final fork. His city-bred eyes had not spotted anything he knew to be edible and reasonably non-toxic anywhere along the way-no apples nor pears nor anything else he recognized as food. The few berries he had seen had been unfamiliar, unripe, and not very appetizing.

  He would need to find food very soon. If he didn’t catch up to Kensher by midday, or find some place he could beg a meal, he would have to turn back.

  Even now, he wasn’t entirely sure he could retrace his steps far enough to find food before he collapsed.

  With that depressing thought, and the gnawing in his gut, it took him a long time to get to sleep.

  When he awoke the sun was already high in the east. He stood, and stretched, and took a moment to orient himself, ignoring the pain in his stomach.

  The path led upward, over a rocky outcropping and through a line of pine trees on a shoulder of the mountain; beyond that he couldn’t see where it went, but at least it would have to be going down, rather than climbing any farther.

  He stretched again, took a deep breath, and marched on.

  He only took about fifteen minutes to top the shoulder and look down through the pines, and when he did he stopped dead in his tracks and stared.

  The path led down from the rocky shoulder onto a broad, flat plateau, through a large herb-and-vegetable garden, between two small, well-tended flowerbeds, and up to the front door of a large, comfortable-looking farmhouse built of square-cut timbers, topped by a red tile roof. To the left of the house was a cliff, the edge of the plateau; to the right was a sizeable fenced-in pasture extending across the plateau and up the slope toward the mountain’s peak, where a few dozen head of cattle were going about their bovine business.

  Dumery didn’t notice any of this until later; he was too busy staring at what laybehind the house.

  There, in huge pens made out of massive black metal beams, were dozens of dragons, ranging from little ones not very much bigger than a housecat up to monsters perhaps twenty feet in length.

  Dumery stared, flabberghasted.

  One of the larger dragons, a green one, raised its head and looked at him, and Dumery swallowed.

  The dragon roared, and was answered by a cacophony of shrieks and bellows from its companions.

  Dumery blinked, and felt tears welling up, tears of exhaustion, frustration, and despair.

  This was no hunting lodge, no trapper’s cabin. Kensher Kinner’s son was quite obviously not a dragon-hunter at all.

  He was a dragon-farmer.

  Dumery let out a sob.

  This possibility had never occurred to him, never would have occurred to him.

  A dragonfarm? It went against everything he
had ever heard. All the stories were about wild, treacherous beasts living free in the forests and mountains.

  Oh, there were people who had brought home dragon eggs, hatched them, and kept the dragons as pets until they reached an unmanageable size and had to be butchered-the Arena had had a dragon on display once when he was very young-but he had never dreamt of anything like this.

  No wonder Kensher hadn’t wanted an apprenticehunter!

  Dumery wiped away tears with the back of his hand and tried to get himself under control. Crying wasn’t going to do him any good, no good at all.

  And besides, wouldn’t a dragon farmer need apprentices? There were a lot of dragons in those pens; it must take several hands to do all the chores for an operation this size. There must be special skills involved in running it.

  Farming was not an occupation that Dumery had ever taken an interest in; farmers, as he understood it, were generally people too poor or stupid or unambitious to find any better trade. Dragon-farming, though, dragon-farming would have to be different.

  Dumery began to feel a little better. Dragon-farming might not be so bad.

  And hunting or farming, if he had a supply of dragon’s blood, it didn’t matter how he got it; he could still lord it over Thetheran and the other wizards who had rejected him.

  And most importantly of all, if he didn’t get something to eat soon he would never make it back down out of these mountains, he’d die up here, of cold or hunger or something.

  Still shocked, he forced himself to march onward, over the rocky shoulder and down toward the farmhouse.

  Dumery was in worse shape than he realized; he had barely managed to knock on the door before his legs gave out, and he collapsed heavily on the doorstep.

  His cheek was pressed against the cold stone of the threshold, one hand underneath, the other out to the side, his feet off some other direction, and he didn’t care about any of it any more. He didn’t want to move, and in fact he didn’t think hecould move any more. His determination had finally run out.

  He just lay there, dazed and unable to move, and even when the door swung open he didn’t react. It took too much effort.

  In fact, everything took too much effort. Even staying conscious took too much effort.

  So he didn’t.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The warlock’s name was Adar Dagon’s son, he told Teneria, and he had grown up a farmer’s son in the Passes. On the Night of Madness, in 5202, as a boy of ten, he had woken up with screaming nightmares, and afterward he had found that he could move things without touching them, could sense what lay beneath the surfaces of things, could create heat and light from nothing-had, in short, become one of the original warlocks.

  He had had no idea what to do, and had at first treated his new gifts as a toy.

  At age twelve an older warlock had taken charge of him and seen to his training and upbringing. This older warlock, Gennar of Tazmor, had told him about the Calling, which had taken hundreds of people on the Night of Madness, and more since.

  As Adar explained to Teneria, the Calling was something that came from the same source as a warlock’s power. The more magic a warlock used, the more powerful he became-warlocks improved with practice, like anyone else, only more so-and the more powerful a warlock became, the stronger the Call was for him.

  The Calling, and the warlocks’ power, came from somewhere in southeastern Aldagmor, and when the Calling became too strong to resist warlocks were drawn to the Source, whatever and wherever it was.

  Some people referred to the Source as the Warlock Stone, but Adar didn’t know why; no one really knew what it was, because nobody who saw it ever came back.

  Warlocks who were drawn to it, who gave in to the Calling, were never heard from again.

  No onecame back. Even non-warlocks didn’t come back. People who got too close to the Sourcebecame warlocks-and most were quickly overpowered by the Calling.

  The closer to the Source a warlock got, the more powerful he became-and the stronger the Calling became for him.

  Adar had known all this for years, and had taken precautions. He had been careful, or at least he thought he had. He had thought he still had a respectable margin of safety, at least in his native village.

  Then he had ventured south from the Passes on an errand for a friend. He had known he shouldn’t go south, of course, but it wasn’t really that far, and Aldagmor and the Warlock Stone were a long way off, so he had thought it was safe. Oh, he expected a nightmare or two, perhaps, but nothing more than that.

  But as he went about his business he felt something slip, and before he knew what was happening he had found himself flying off, destination unknown, out of control of his own mind and powers.

  When he realized what was happening he tried to resist, he struggled, and although it had seemed hopeless, he had fought the Calling to a momentary standstill, there over the forest.

  Then he had passed out from the strain, and when he had come to and resumed the struggle, there Teneria was, helping him.

  And here he was beside her, astonished and relieved, even though he knew the reprieve might be only temporary.

  Temporary or not, it was quite a surprise. “We didn’t know witches could help,” he said.

  “Neither did we witches,” Teneria replied, smiling. “I’m as surprised as you are.”

  He nodded, and then asked, jokingly, “If you didn’t come just to save me, then what are you doing in Aldagmor?”

  “Oh, I came to save somebody else entirely,” Teneria said.

  He raised an eyebrow in inquiry.

  She told him about Dumery; he listened, but quickly lost interest.

  Teneria, herself, was not really terribly concerned about the boy at this point. She realized that his trail was growing cold, and that she could be in serious trouble with her mistress if she lost him, but somehow she couldn’t bring herself to worry too much about that when she had something as mysterious and important as the warlock’s problem to worry about. Dumery surely knew where he was going; he couldn’t have wandered this far into the wilds of Aldagmor just by chance. After all, if he had been seeking his fortune, with nothing in particular in mind, wouldn’t he have gone to Sardiron of the Waters, rather than Aldagmor?

  And thanks to the psychic traces she had been following, she knew he was traveling alone, so he wasn’t being kidnapped. What she could sense of his state of mind didn’t seem to indicate any particular distress; he was all right, at least so far, even if she didn’t know what he was doing.

  Whatever he was up to, it could wait. All this new information about warlockry and the Calling was much more intriguing. For one thing, the possibilities of an alliance between witches and warlocks were obvious to both Teneria and Adar.

  The two schools of magic used roughly similar magical skills-the sensing from afar, the levitation, and the rest-but in radically different ways. Witches, with the limits imposed by the finite energy of their bodies, had devoted themselves to subtlety, to the crucial fine adjustment, the touch in the right spot. Warlocks, with seemingly-infinite power not just available, but pressing upon them andasking to be used, while at the same time they knew that to use too much power could mean the unknown doom of the Calling, had developed a different style-avoiding the actual use of magic much of the time, but then turning raw brute force onto the matter at hand when called for.

  As an example, had Teneria healed Adar’s wrist, she would have encouraged the bone to grow back together cell by cell and fiber by fiber. Adar had simply forced the pieces back together and fused them in a single operation. That would have exhausted a witch for hours, but was nothing at all for a warlock.

  And another difference was that warlocks lacked the ability to sense, interpret, and manipulate the minds and emotions of others-the talent that was the very heart of witchcraft.

  It was those skills at mental manipulation that had made it possible for Teneria to partially block the Calling, and that block was what let Ada
r resist it.

  Teneria’s account of her pursuit of Dumery was cut short when Adar asked impatiently, “So which way did this kid go?”

  “South,” Teneria answered, pointing.

  She sensed the worm of fear that stirred in his mind as Adar asked, “Are you going to follow him?”

  She hesitated, remembering that south was where the Source was, and then said, “No. At least, not right away.”

  Adar sighed with relief.

  “What, then?” he asked. “Whatare you going to do?”

  Teneria blinked, and looked around at the night-shrouded garden. Torches burned at the rear door of the inn, and the greater moon was in the sky. For a moment she thought she might have seen the spriggan peeping around a rock, but then it was gone, and she was too busy with Adar’s mind to probe for the little creature’s.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “What areyou going to do?”

  “I should head back north,” Adar said uneasily, “as soon as possible. I need to get farther from the Source.”

  The witch nodded. “I’ll come with you and help,” she said. “At least until you’re safe again.”

  Adar smiled. “Good,” he said. “Now?”

  Teneria hesitated again, and a yawn caught her. “In the morning,” she said.

  “Right now I need some rest.”

  Adar’s smile vanished.

  “But, Teneria,” he said, “you can’t sleep.”

  “Huh?” She blinked, smothering another yawn. “Why not?”

  “Because if you sleep...” he began. Then he stopped, and demanded, “Can you work witchcraft in your sleep?”

  “No, of course not,” she replied, baffled.

  “Then if you sleep...” He took a deep breath, then said, “If you sleep, it’ll get me.”

  A sudden coldness clamped down on Teneria’s heart.

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  When Dumery woke he found himself lying on something warm and soft, surrounded by the scents of soap and lavender. He heard gentle creakings and rustlings and thumps, the sounds of a household going about its ordinary business.