Servant of the Dragon

by David Drake

  "They're sphinxes, Garric," Liane said. "Winged sphinxes. They couldn't fly with little wings like that, though."

  She looked at Tenoctris. "Could they?" she added. Garric wasn't sure from Liane's tone whether the question was serious.

  "The statues are just a decoration," Tenoctris said, eyeing them as they climbed past to the next terrace. "Though the men who carved them could fly. At least they could have flown if they'd wanted to. They'd given it up long before the last of them had died."

  Garric missed a step in amazement. "How could anybody give up flying?" he asked.

  Often while minding sheep he'd put down whatever book he'd brought and watched instead the gulls gliding above the sea. Land birds didn't impress him. The little ones darted from place to place with no thought but safety or another bite to eat. Vultures wheeled all day above a sunlit field, but their circles were even more obviously empty than the punctuated fluttering of their lesser brethren.

  But the whole world belonged to the gulls. Their gray wings coursed from island to island, and they made their home for the night wherever they chose.

  "The people who built Alae had other concerns," Tenoctris said. She looked back at the rank of downward-looking sphinxes. "Perhaps they'd have been better off to remember flight," she added. "Though I shouldn't judge other people."

  The third terrace was surrounded by a railing. Blowing sand had sculpted its spiral bannisters thinner yet; some had been worn to stubs reaching toward one another like pairs of stalactites and stalagmites.

  An ornamental gateway, square and massive, framed the steps. Its flat surfaces were carved in low relief. The wind must always come from the northwest because the figures on the sheltered angles were still sharp. There were willowy humans, nude but sexless, carrying out rituals that involved pouring fluid from basin to basin and over one another. Their faces were almond-shaped and without expression.

  Liane carried the collapsible desk that held her writing equipment and whatever documents she felt she'd need for her present endeavors. Though the case was no heavier than a traveller's wallet, she paused to switch the strap from her right shoulder to her left. Garric was tiring fast in the thin air, too.

  "Alman is the last of his race, then?" Liane asked.

  "Alman bor-Hallimann was a wizard in the time of King Lorcan," Tenoctris said, smiling faintly. "He was horrified by the upheaval that attended the founding of the kingdom and wanted to go somewhere where he'd have peace for his studies. He came to Alae after other men were gone from the city."

  She looked around at the windswept magnificence. "He has a scrying glass made from the lens of the Behemoth's single eye," she added. "I want to borrow it to view the other side of the bridge."

  "Will Alman help us?" Liane asked. "If he came here for peace...?"

  "He'll help us because he's human and mankind needs help," Garric said. "Or if Alman no longer cares about humanity--"

  He touched his swordhilt, reassuring himself that it was where he knew it was.

  "--then I don't care very much about Alman's willingness."

  The slabs paving the fourth terrace were a material different from the ruddy stone of which the remainder of the city was made. Water! Garric's eyes told him, but a dusting of sand had blown onto even this relatively high surface. Aloud he said, "Is it glass?"

  The surface was smooth, dangerously smooth. Garric placed his feet carefully, stepping straight down, because he knew that otherwise he'd fall and take Tenoctris with him. Sand grains scrunched beneath his boots.

  "It's too hard for glass, Garric," Liane said. "The blowing sand hasn't etched it at all."

  She swallowed; the thin air seemed to dry throats abnormally fast. "It could be sapphire, though," she added quietly.

  Garric frowned, trying to see the pavement as a creation rather than an obstacle as dangerous to cross as a narrow ledge. The surface was flat: it reflected the surrounding buildings without distortion, and on it the stars glittered as motionless points in the same relation to one another as they had in the cold heavens.

  Garric wasn't sure whether the pavement had color. Perhaps it was blue or blue-black, but he might be seeing the sky echoed deep in a crystal of white purity.

  They reached the highest terrace. Garric sighed with relief as he set his boot on the border of pale sandstone. It was hard and originally highly polished to judge from corners which blowing grit hadn't scored, but it was safe to walk on so long as it was dry. "How did they get across that without breaking their necks?" he complained.

  "Mostly they didn't leave the building," Tenoctris explained. "Toward the end, everyone stayed in his room, being fed by the beings they'd created. And finally, of course, the last of them died."

  "How can anyone choose to live here?" Liane asked. "Alman could have gone other places for privacy. Alae isn't just dead--it was never alive."

  "The men who built it didn't think as we do," Tenoctris said. "For which I'm very thankful. And as for Alman, I can't say; but he has the power to leave at any time, so this is where he wants to be."

  "Still, it's beautiful," Garric said. "I don't think I'd be comfortable here myself, but it's very peaceful."

  "Which you are not, lad," King Carus said. "There were wise, peaceful folk in my day too--priests, some of them; philosophers; even ordinary people who'd decided that they couldn't live with themselves if they took away the life even of someone bent on their destruction."

  The ancient king saw more through Garric's eyes than Garric himself did: a niche that would conceal an assassin, a parapet from which bowmen could step to rain arrows on those in the courtyard below; a sand-sawn cornice that even a child could lever down on an enemy approaching the wall. With a harshness that Carus rarely showed, he added, "Perhaps the Lady delights in their presence; but by what they were afraid or unwilling to do, the kingdom and the lives of their neighbors all went smash."

  Garric looked at Liane, then Tenoctris. Aloud he said, "The world has room enough for peaceful folk. I think they're as likely to be advancing the cause of good as ever I am when I put my hand to my sword."

  The women looked at him--Tenoctris knowingly, Liane with a quizzical lift of the eyebrows. In Garric's mind, his ancestor laughed approval.

  They entered the building through a portal that was perfectly square and high enough for a giant. The doorleaves were of silvery metal that the sand had worn more than the stone in which they were set. One valve hung on its hinges; the other was a tangle of scraps half-in, half-out of the hallway beyond. The metal surfaces were chased, though the patterns might have been those of the skirling wind using sand for burins.

  From a distance the building seemed monolithic, unmarred and unchangeable. Closer by, Garric could tell that sand had burnished off the fine detail of the lower carvings, and that many woody-stemmed, spiky plants had found cracks in the stonework in which to grow. The walls would trap dew in the mornings and channel the droplets down to niches at the margins, providing a constant source of water in this barren waste.

  A first glimpse of the vaulted hallway showed that time's tendrils of destruction had worked on the interior as well. Even so, Garric touched his sword and Liane gasped to see gigantic faces smiling at them from the walls.

  A black beetle the size of Garric's little fingernail scurried out of sight in the joint between the blocks forming the right and left side of the nearest face's lips. It was the first form of animal life that Garric had seen in this place.

  "Who are they?" Liane asked. Moonlight filtering from openings high above gave the ten faces--five on either wall--a sinister cast, but their expressions were probably intended to be serene under proper lighting. Their lips were fleshy, their noses broad, and their cheeks heavy in contrast to the epicene grace of the figures on the terrace archway.

  Tenoctris looked at the carvings with only the general interest she showed for all that came her way. Each wore a complex headdress of porticos and dancers. Despite the dim light, Garric could tell that t
he sculptors had distorted the figures to compensate for the foreshortening of seeing them from the floor.

  "I suspect they're meant for mankind as a whole," Tenoctris said. "But I can't be sure."

  She smiled at her companions. "The only one who knew anything of Alae were Alman himself and the student from his own time who helped him as he studied the city," she explained. "The student--we don't have his name, he's just the Acolyte from Shengy--left an account which others copied in part for their almagests."

  Tenoctris coughed in slight embarrassment at what was for her boastfulness. "I'm not a powerful wizard," she said, "but there are more ways to learn things than by wizardry. I connected several accounts that didn't mention Alman by name with one that did, but which didn't say anything about him viewing Alae. I realized that it was here that he must have taken refuge from the Wars of Unification, carrying his paraphernalia of art. I was very proud of myself."

  She looked at the towering faces about them, her own expression oddly similar to the stone smiles despite the contrast with her fine-drawn, birdlike features. "But I never thought," Tenoctris said, "that I'd be able to see Alae with my own eyes. I don't have the power to view this place, let alone visit it in the flesh. The bridge draws the cosmos to a single flat sheet in which all time is one time. That made it possible for us to be here."

  Liane nodded. "And makes it necessary for us to remove the bridge," she said, "before Alae and Valles and all time mix. I don't know exactly what the result would be, but I suspect--"

  She grinned and squeezed Garric's hand, reassurance for both of them.

  "--a repeat of the way the Old Kingdom ended would be preferable."

  "Well, that's why we're here," Garric said carefully.

  Tenoctris laughed. "Yes, indeed," she said. She paused to cough and clear her dry throat. "I'm so used to thinking of myself as a scholar that sometimes I forget the times require me to be a person of action.

  "Now, how to find Alman?" she went on. Her eyes darted toward each of the three hallways leading from the anteroom. "The incantation I spoke should have brought us by the principle of congruity to the point where Alman entered this plane: the same action in the same medium will cause the same response. That doesn't tell us where he may have walked after he arrived here, however."

  The sand on the floor was unmarked except for whorls drawn by the moving air itself. Garric looked back. The three of them had left clear prints. The wind would erase them eventually, but the air was too thin to shovel sand grains quickly.

  "Will he be growing crops," Garric asked. "Or does he get his food through wizardry?"

  "I can't say for a wizard as powerful as Alman," Tenoctris said with a wry smile. "But the amount of effort to create or transmute matter by art on the scale that a human needs it to live would take most of the waking hours of most wizards."

  She looked behind her, out the open doorway toward the barren plaza. "It might be equally difficult to grow things here, though. I'm not an expert on farming. Or much else that doesn't involve a book."

  Garric laughed. "I can't tell you much about raising crops in this desert myself," he said, "but if Alman chose to come here we can assume he had a plan to keep himself fed. Let's walk straight through--"

  He stretched out his arm.

  "--and see if we come to another courtyard on the other side. I don't see how he could be farming in the building itself."

  "The roof of the right wing may have fallen in," Liane suggested. "It looked as though it had from where we stood when we arrived."

  Garric stamped his foot. "The floor's still stone," he said mildly, "even if plants could get light."

  He remembered how confused he'd been the first time he entered a city; how confusing he still found cities. City-dwellers snarled or sneered at people who asked them questions they thought were obvious. Liane simply explained without ever suggesting that Garric was stupid because he was ignorant. That attitude was one of Liane's many virtues that Garric was trying to copy.

  They walked down the hallway, their footsteps echoing. Tenoctris' toes dragged audibly; Garric paused to shift his grip, spreading his hand on the old woman's hipbone to lift her without making it harder for her to breathe.

  "Tenoctris?" Liane asked. "Why didn't Alman's acolyte come here with him?"

  "What?" said the wizard. "I'm not sure, Liane; none of the preserved fragments of his account say anything about that, though...."

  She looked toward the younger woman. Garric, glancing over Tenoctris' head, was surprised to see how solemn Liane's expression was.

  "I expect, since Alman's purpose was to leave his world completely," Tenoctris resumed carefully, "that he never intended his acolyte to accompany him."

  "That seemed likely to me too," Liane said. "I wonder how the acolyte felt about being abandoned."

  It wasn't really a question, so Garric didn't say anything in reply. If Tenoctris hadn't been between them, though, he would have hugged Liane.

  Doorways--some with their metal panels closed, others standing ajar--were spaced every twenty feet on either side of the passageway. Occasional rents in the outer walls let in light. The rooms were as empty as the hall, though sometimes the vividly carved wall reliefs startled Garric into thinking people were watching him.

  For the most part the only illumination was the ghostly haze from above. Garric's eyes adapted to it, but he felt as though he were walking through a cave by the light of glowing fungus.

  "Tenoctris?" he said. "There weren't any windows in the rooms originally. How did the people see? By wizardry?"

  "They didn't call it that," Tenoctris said. "They had arts they thought were as natural as you do lighting a candle. Of course, the spell that brought us here was perfectly natural also. I suppose anything's unnatural if you can't do it yourself."

  She laughed. "And I certainly couldn't light these halls the way the builders did," she added.

  When they'd come a quarter mile from the anteroom, Garric saw a rotunda opening ahead. They walked on. The hall and the rooms lying off it had twenty-foot ceilings, making the rooms perfect cubes. The rotunda was over a hundred feet in diameter and as high as it was wide. Another giant doorway gaped on the other side. Some light spilled through it, but more came from the hatch in the ceiling to which a flight of metal steps climbed in a tight helix.

  "He's been coming in and out of that door," Garric said, nodding toward the smudged sand. "I'm going to look closer."

  Without being asked, Liane took Tenoctris' weight. Garric strode quickly across the circular space with both hands free. He didn't expect danger to come at them through the doorway--the beetle was still the only animal he'd seen in this world--but he didn't need Carus' vivid memories of ambush and surprise to remind him that he didn't know anything about this place except that he'd never seen anything similar in the past.

  The wind moaned, echoing in the high cylinder. Nothing else moved. Around the walls was a relief of men using the body of an enormous serpent as a capstan bar to turn millstones centered on the doorway. Two-legged creatures with gills and scales were gobbling the parts of men who'd fallen into the mill.

  Stuffed into the carvings of the lower register were bulbs the size of a man's head and seed pods like those of the locust tree. What Garric had taken for rubbish was actually a collection of gathered food.

  Garric turned. The women had followed him at a pace set by the old wizard's frailty. "I think we've found Alman," he said. "If his larder's here, he can't be far away."

  All three looked at the silvery spiral rising to the ceiling. It was as delicate as spiderweb, and they'd seen repeated proof that the metal weathered here more quickly than the stone around it. The steps bore fresh scratches from feet grinding sand-grains into the treads.

  "Then I think we should go see him," Tenoctris said, starting for the stairs on Liane's arm.

  "Let me lead," Garric said quietly. He slid his sword a finger's breadth up in its sheath and let it drop back.

&nb
sp; The wind moaned.

  Not that there was any danger....

  Cashel stretched, first raising his arms and standing on tiptoe, then bending backward with his staff planted behind him as the third leg of a tripod to keep him from falling over. He felt unusually--

  Well, he wasn't sure what to call it. Not unusually strong, because strength was something Cashel took for granted the same way he did sunrise. You wouldn't talk about an unusually rising sun, would you?

  'Clean' was more like the right word. He'd slept like the dead after Colva fled from him, but there was more to it than a good night's rest. He felt like all the dross had been burned out of him the way a fever would do. He guessed that was Colva's doing.

  Cashel grinned. Maybe he ought to thank her, but he guessed that like a fever she was at least as likely to kill as cure.

  "What are you smirking about?" Krias demanded. "Have you realized you'd better turn and run the other way?"

  Cashel looked down at the ring. Usually the figure was a blur inside the stone, but just now the little demon glittered like a purple spark on the surface.

  "No," Cashel said, "I was just about to start down. Should I close the door behind me?"

  "The door won't keep the monsters out," Krias said. "Only the Guardian could do that, and you've killed him!"

  "So I did," Cashel agreed mildly. He checked his wallet once more, then laced the flap tightly over the bread and cheese he'd brought from Valles--and the little wafer of Landure's life. The disk seemed sturdy enough, but he'd wrapped it in moss nonetheless and tied the bundle with a stem of rye grass.

  "I guess I'll close it anyway," he said as he stepped through the bronze portal. He didn't understand why people--and generally little people, though never before anyone as little as Krias was--tried to get him angry. Mostly it was after they'd had more ale than was good for them.

  "Do you drink, Krias?" Cashel asked. "Drink ale and cider, I mean?"

  "What?" Krias shrilled. "Of course not, you ninny! I'm a demon, don't you remember?"