Servant of the Dragon

by David Drake

  What sort of sources could Herfa and the others have used? The annals of great families, perhaps--written to glorify members of their own house. Temple records, cursory at best. Besides, for the most part the temple lists were transferred to stone from painted boards only when the originals had been copied many times by bored, careless scribes. Minstrels' tales, told to entertain rather than inform and embellished in whatever fashion the singer thought would earn him the highest pay.

  And imagination. Sharina knew that the historians of the Old Kingdom had been human. Like other humans they generally preferred to invent explanations rather than admit they were ignorant.

  None of what Sharina knew about King Lorcan was as trustworthy as the gossip about Lady Sharina that teamsters told in the taverns of Valles. The stories about Lorcan's inhuman companion had even less grounding than that.

  But King Lorcan had existed: the Kingdom of the Isles proved he was real. It was easier to believe that a great wizard had aided Lorcan than it was to imagine that a minor noble on the island of Haft had arisen from chaos to unite the Isles without the help of wizardry. And while the Dragon might not be 'real' in the sense that Cashel was real to the touch, Sharina had certainly met someone in these ruins tonight.

  She grinned. Perhaps the Dragon could dictate to her a true history of Lorcan and the founding of the Kingdom of the Isles. If she published such a work, however, the scholars of Valles and Erdin would dismiss her text as a naive attempt to euhemerize myth. Well, she wasn't cut out to be a historian.

  Something hopped in front of her. A mouse, she thought, but its second hop took it into a patch of moonlight and she saw it was gray-mottled toad.

  The air was full of insects--many of them mosquitoes with a taste for Sharina--and she'd seen lizards scurrying over the stones. There were no bats, and the birds she'd seen and heard in the surrounding woods didn't call within the compound.

  Sharina had wondered why the settlers who'd pursued her had been unwilling to step through the gateway. To her the ruin seemed little different from the woods near Barca's Hamlet, but the feeling of discomfort that barred the villagers worked on other warm-blooded creatures as well.

  The Dragon had welcomed Sharina. Almost certainly the creature that brought her to this place had been the Dragon's minion; but she'd given her oath to serve the Dragon, and even on reflection she didn't see that she'd had any better choice.

  She wondered 'when' in the greater fabric of time the present was. The Dragon had said she was on Cordin--what would be Cordin. She'd seen the shark's head standard outside the raw settlement. Rigal spoke of the shark's head being the symbol of Cordin's first ruling dynasty.

  But Rigal was alluding to events many millennia in his past, and he'd been dead for thousands of years when Sharina was born. A myth of a myth....

  She smiled. She might as well smile.

  Sharina had started to climb over the rock in front of her before she realized this was the throne that the Dragon had sent her to find. It was of the same material as most of the city around it: light-colored granite, very fine-grained and hard.

  The throne's back and arms were low and perfectly smooth instead of being chased with complex designs. The wide seat had been mortised into the block that formed the rest of the structure.

  Sharina eyed it, then cut a length of rattan for a pry bar with two blows of the Pewle knife. She worked the end of the rattan into the back joint, then levered the seat forward enough to give her fingers a grip. Rootlets had found purchase between other, equally tightly-fitted stones, but the throne was as bare as the day the masons finished with it.

  If masons and not wizards had formed it.

  The seat slid forward like a drawer, moving easily despite its weight. Sharina left it in the grooves when she'd pulled it open far enough to remove the objects in the alcove beneath.

  The material folded on top looked like cloth, but she felt the dry rustle beneath her fingers as she picked it up: it was a snakeskin. It had girdled a body as thick as Sharina's thigh, but it was only six feet long. No snake she knew of had those dimensions.

  She held the skin to the moonlight. It was subtly mottled, but it had stretched when the snake cast it and the markings were faint anyway. Sharina couldn't tell anything from the pattern. She wasn't even certain there was a pattern.

  Sharina wore her knife on a belt that had been cut for a stocky man. The belt's tongue was long enough to double Sharina's waist, but she hadn't been willing to trim the heavy leather to fit her more closely. Now she loosed the buckle. Twisting the skin lightly as though it were silk, she wrapped it twice around her waist and cinched the belt over it.

  Her neighbors in Barca's Hamlet would have thought anyone dressed in a snakeskin had gone mad, but Sharina had seen fine ladies in Erdin and Valles wearing far more exotic garments. She grinned. Perhaps she'd return to the capital to start a new fashion.

  Sharina reached into the hollow seat and brought out the other object: a plaque, slightly trapezoidal, and stamped from thin gold. There were holes at the four corners; Sharina guessed it was meant to be worn as a pectoral on a priest's breast.

  Embossed on the metal was the head of a humanoid reptile: the Dragon or a member of the Dragon's race. Its jaws were open slightly, baring the pointed teeth in what could be either a smile or a snarl.

  Around the plaque's border was a line of non-repeating symbols, sharply-incised wedges. At first glance Sharina took them for decoration, but closer appraisal suggested they might be writing. They were beyond her ability or that of any other human to translate, though, and she no longer had time for whimsy: the moon was nearing zenith.

  Sharina pulled open the neck of her tunic and slid the plaque inside to nestle against her belly where the sash caught it. Gold is heavy, and even a thin sheet like this was a noticeable weight. In sheer metal value, the plaque was worth more than her father's inn.

  She wormed through the stand of gnarled beech trees between her and the archway. Their roots had managed to find lodging between blocks of the pavement, but the meager nutrients available stunted them.

  Sharina paused to catch her breath when she'd gotten past the beeches. Almost as an afterthought she looked around and realized that she'd reached her destination: a pillar rose from either side, leaning inward to meet above her in a corbelled arch.

  The arch was of black stone unlike anything else in the city. Like the throne, its surfaces were unadorned. Vegetation brushed and shrouded it, but the roots and tendrils hadn't worked their way into the stone fabric.

  Sharina placed herself between the pillars. Their shadow, black like the stone itself, pooled around her but a blur of light wavered in the center. She twisted to look straight overhead.

  There was a small hole in the very top of the arch. Light channeled through the opening showed its raised stone lip was cross-hatched, or perhaps covered by the same wedge-shaped markings as the pectoral beneath Sharina's tunic.

  Small though the opening was, the moon was in perfect alignment with it. The edge of the white disk blazed coldly through a tunnel of stone. In a moment it would--

  The light tugged at her eyes. Once a mummer had brought his camera obscura to the Sheep Fair and amazed spectators by projecting an image of the world upside down onto the curtain behind him. Wizardry, he claimed, and the folk who watched--visiting merchants as well as locals--were willing for the most part to believe him.

  Reise alone said that it was only a trick of the light streaming through the pinhole at one end of the box--marvelous, but no more wizard's work than a rainbow is. Sharina had taken her father's word for it--Reise was no more likely to lie than he was to dance naked in the street--but she'd thought even then that perhaps there was more magic in a rainbow than her father thought.

  This arch was another camera obscura, only that. But the opening was toward the empty sky, and the images that it threw onto Sharina were--

  She felt her body dissolving like salt in creek water. She was part of time
, flowing through eternity: every rock, every tree, every living thing was Sharina os-Reise, and she was all of them. The cosmos shone as a brilliant tapestry about her. Momentarily she wondered if this was how Ilna always viewed the world--

  But it couldn't be, because this was perfect beauty. The world in which Ilna lived was a bleak expanse of misery and desperation. Sharina knew her friend too well to doubt that; and now, seeing this cosmos, she pitied Ilna as well. Everyone chose her own life....

  Existence slowed. Time had no duration in Sharina's eternal present, but she could feel boundaries closing about her.

  She was standing. For a moment she thought she'd gone blind, but that was because she was seeing with the eyes of her body alone instead of being all the cosmos.

  It was late in the afternoon, and the air was warmer than that of the ruin Sharina had left. Beyond the mouth of the alley in which she stood were buildings, two stories high and three, in which people wearing kilts and light wrappers went about their ordinary business.

  A man walking past the alley mouth saw Sharina and frowned, lengthening his pace. He didn't seem surprised, just mildly disapproving.

  Sharina was shaking. She couldn't remember any clear image from the transition that brought her here, but lack of that oneness with eternity gnawed her soul like a cancer. She had been... she'd been everything! And now....

  Sharina squatted and lowered her head, forcing herself to breathe deeply. After a moment her body's shuddering stopped and she could straighten up, feeling embarrassed at her reaction. Though perhaps--

  When a man is rescued from drowning, he gasps and splutters on the shore. Sharina knew she'd been drowning also, submerged and dissolving in the flow of eternity.

  More pedestrians crossed the alley mouth, some of them glancing in her direction. Their chatter and the street cries were no different than she'd heard often when walking through Valles. Though the speakers used a dialect broader than Sharina was used to, she could generally understand the words.

  She looked at herself and decided to hang the big knife over one shoulder so that her cape would conceal it; the folk in the street didn't go armed. The pectoral was a heavy presence within her tunic. Taking another deep breath, Sharina prepared to go out.

  It was only then that she noticed the side of the building to her left. It had been plastered but not recently, and some of the coating had flaked off. The wall beneath was built from the inscribed blocks of the city where Sharina had met the Dragon.

  Katchin the Miller stumbled on cobblestones as he left Garric and the two women. The bridge's wavering light distorted the joins between stones, and Katchin was half-blind with tears of frustration besides.

  What had happened? How could little Garric or-Reise, a boy who'd been exposed to Katchin's worth every day of his life, send him away?

  Katchin heard the old woman mumbling behind him. Light flared, throwing Katchin's long shadow across the pavement. Suddenly frightened, he glanced over his shoulder. An upward-flaring cone of light surrounded the trio who'd just dismissed him; its blue glare filtered their bodies into figures of smoke. The air buzzed, like a cicada but louder. The note rose steadily.

  Katchin started to run. He'd bought new shoes in Valles to be sure he'd be in style. The uppers were red leather; the toes curled like crooked fingers and were finished by little tassels of gold cord.

  The soles were as smooth as the uppers, though, and these cobblestones had been polished like glass by ages of use. Katchin slipped and fell, crying out with pain and anger at the world's injustice toward him.

  The light surrounding Garric and the others brightened further, but it no longer cast shadows. The cone started to spin. Cobblestones at the edge of the vortex rippled and began lifting from their bed. The sound keened too high to be heard with ears, but Katchin felt his teeth quiver.

  He got onto all fours, wheezing and gasping. To be treated like some common peasant--and then this!

  There was no one in sight. Katchin was close to the buildings, so the soldiers down the cross street couldn't see him nor he them. The windows facing the street were shuttered and the rooms behind them empty.

  A vortex of whirling light spun off the greater cone which enclosed Garric. It wandered across the pavement, illuminating nothing but showing within itself glimpses of other worlds, other times.

  Three more cones spat away from the mother cone, each turning its own drunken path into the night. One wobbled toward Katchin.

  He got to his feet and ran, this time placing his feet with the care of a townsman trying to cross a plowed field. He was wearing his best clothing: his short cape had gold trim, and his saffron tunics were layered so that the appliqued border of the inner one showed beneath that of the outer. The sash of crimson silk around Katchin's waist had cost him the price of a dozen sheep. It was water damaged now because he'd had his wife Feyda wash the garment rather than asking his niece Ilna to clean it.

  Ilna wouldn't have refused. No, she'd have sneered at Katchin, done the work perfectly as she did everything having to do with fabric, and sneered again as she dropped Katchin's payment back in the dirt at his feet. He loved money, but the insult of having Ilna fling it back at him would have been worse than the cost; though it meant half-ruining the sash as a consequence.

  Katchin was the most important man in Barca's Hamlet! He was the bailiff Count Lascarg! How could everyone treat him with contempt?

  Sometimes Katchin almost managed to convince himself that on his trips to Carcosa he dined with the count instead of being dismissed from the palace by an underclerk when he offered his report. But nobody else in the borough believed Katchin, even though he was the richest of them by far. He deserved respect!

  He felt a buzzing, bone deep and as piercing as a rabbit's scream. He looked over his shoulder. A vortex skated toward him. He screamed. The vortex pirouetted as though it were his partner in a reel dance.

  Katchin sprang away from it--

  slipped--

  and fell into flat, gray light with no color and no shadows. A woman stood facing him. She wore a robe of bleached linen, and her skin was painted with white lead.

  "Where am I?" Katchin said. His voice didn't echo. The street, the bridge of wizardlight--the vortex itself that he thought had enveloped him--all were gone. There wa nothing but a woman as colorless as old bone. "Who are--did you bring me here?"

  The shrill buzzing had stopped. It was as though the gray ambiance were a wall isolating Katchin from the world he had left.

  The woman raised her right hand and dangled a human neck vertebra from her index finger. It hung on a cord of the particular red-blond color of hair growing on the heads of dead men.

  The woman twitched the bangle with her other hand. It rotated sunwise, then widdershins, before Katchin's staring eyes.

  "We have things to discuss, Katchin the Miller," the woman said. Her voice was toneless. "You will come with me."

  "I will come with you," Katchin's lips said. His voice was a dead echo of her own. "We have things to discuss."

  The woman walked into the grayness, her steps as slow as a pallbearer's. She held the neck bone at her side, spinning one direction and then the other. Katchin followed, his eyes on the bangle.

  "I will come with you," his lips repeated.

  Chapter Twelve

  The courtyard Garric stood with Tenoctris and Liane was big enough to swallow the Field of Monuments in Carcosa. Sand had swept in from the west, covering whatever walls or buildings had stood on that side.

  "Is this a city or all one building?" Liane asked. "It looks as though it's all connected."

  "It's both, really," Tenoctris said. "A vast building to contain all of mankind. The builders called it Alae, which meant Wings in their language, and it was man's last city."

  Though Tenoctris had claimed she could walk by herself, Garric made sure his left arm was taking most of her weight. He breathed deeply but his lungs didn't seem to fill properly. He certainly wasn't going to let he
r strain herself physically if he could help it.

  "The last?" Liane said. It was hard to hear her voice. The air didn't carry sound well, but Liane was speaking softly besides. The thought must have disturbed her. Garric was too focused on his own problems to worry about those of a city long dead.

  "The last of mankind on this world," Tenoctris said quietly. "There has to be an end some time, you know. What we must do is see to it that it's a natural end, not because chaos triumphed and wiped life away before its time."

  She squeezed Garric's biceps affectionately and reached out to pat Liane's arm with the other hand. "That's what we have to try to do, I mean."

  "Evil won't win while I'm standing," Garric said, echoing the thought of the king in his mind. He laughed and added, "While any of us are."

  Though hidden, the western structures stabilized the dune and prevented it from devouring the remainder of the plaza with a single sinuous bound. Tendrils of glistening sand had squirmed to the first of the five terraces rising from the central hollow, but the small-leafed bushes rooting in cracks in the pavement were visibly different from the vegetation that grew on the dune itself.

  They mounted three steps to the first terrace. Garric had seen fields where the ground was shored up to hold rainwater and to flatten the surface to make cultivating easier. This--changing the contours of the land on an enormous scale merely to create a vista for those beholding it--was new to him.

  From Carus' memory cascaded images of the great cities of the Old Kingdom. Carcosa, Valles, and a dozen metropolitan centers had structures built on an impressive scale, but no single unified artifact like this one.

  At about every twenty yards around the edge, as though looking down into the pit, were statues of crouching beasts. They'd been heavily worn by blowing sand.

  "Are these lions?" Garric asked. There were humps on the backs of the stone creatures.

  The moon was well up. Though it seemed larger than the orb which shone on the world to which he'd been born, its light was reddish and not as clear as he expected.