Servant of the Dragon

by David Drake

  Cashel started down the road that led back to a place he couldn't remember clearly. Sharina wasn't in Tian; and by the goodness of the Lady, might she never be here. By the time he was a few furlongs away, his spirits had started to lift.

  The morning dimmed. Though the sky overhead was clear, clouds were beginning to pile up on the eastern horizon to block the sun.

  Cashel eyed them and frowned. There was no shelter closer than an hour's hike. As black and boiling as the clouds rising over the hills appeared, they were going to bring a storm like few he'd experienced. He slipped the thong of his countryman's hat down over his chin, knowing that if there was hail--as there well might be--the broad leather brim could be the difference between discomfort and outright injury.

  Spectators in Tian screamed. Cashel looked at the horizon again. It wasn't a storm rising over the hills; it was a striding figure of cloud.

  The storm giant was black and swirling gray. Red lightning flashed in his head like angry eyes, and in his right hand was a club greater than the tallest tree that ever grew.

  The nobles wailed from the battlements, but their joined voices were less than a lamb's bleat against the howl of oncoming destruction. The giant strode forward. His head towered high above the floating city, and his cloud arms raised the club.

  Cashel watched the figure approach. He started to poise his quarterstaff, then stood it firmly on the ground beside him. There was nothing a man could do except watch or flee. Cashel or-Kenset wouldn't flee, but neither would he make a fool of himself.

  The servants were a dull mass in the near distance, staying together like ants crowded onto a floating leaf when their hill flooded. The cloud giant ignored them as he ignored the knights of Tian praying or slashing at the air like madmen beneath him.

  The club came down with gathering speed and struck the center of the floating city. Stone shattered. Tian rocked like a sheep, suddenly aware and trying to back away from the slaughterer's hammer.

  The cloud giant struck again, this time a two-handed blow from the side and slightly below. The ramp flew away like a ribbon in a sea breeze, twisting and vanishing into no more than a scatter of droplets when it hit the ground. The shimmering underplate on which the city floated, dented down by the first impact, now collapsed around the club head.

  The club of storm withdrew. The plate was disintegrating, thinning and vanishing like mist in the late morning. Stone blocks, no longer supported, dribbled out of the sky. They took a surprising length of time to fall before drumming on the ground, leaping and bouncing and shattering on one another. The city was a burial mound for her knights.

  The nobles of Tian were among the rain of objects. Their bright silks fluttered all the long way down.

  Cashel turned his head and resumed walking away from what had been a city. He was still walking when green light awakened him on the hillside where he'd eaten the huge grapes in another lifetime.

  "Well, did you learn something, sheep-boy?" Krias asked.

  Instead of answering, Cashel ran his index finger down the hickory shaft of his staff, then touched the sapphire as well. The purple stone felt warm and reassuring.

  "Hey!" cried the ring demon. "What's that about? I just asked a civil question!"

  "Just glad to see you're still with me," Cashel said. "This isn't much of a place to be alone, is it?"

  "I was alone for so long," Krias said, and for once his voice didn't seem really harsh. "Then Landure came and chipped me out of the rock; but he wouldn't free me from the sapphire, sheep-boy, no matter how I begged him. But I had Landure, then, so that was all right. Even though Landure was a fool, he was all I had."

  Cashel rubbed his thumb against the stone he'd pillowed his head on. One side was heavily carved with vines and flowers like those of the dining hall. All the walls of Tian were decorated, though; this block might have come from anywhere in the city.

  "Master Krias?" Cashel said. "Was the dream I just had real?"

  "'Real' isn't a useful word here," the ring demon said. "Not for sheep-boys, and especially not for me."

  Cashel rose to his feet. He was hungry enough to eat again, but he thought he'd wait until he could find something growing at a distance from here. He started across the overgrown mound, headed in the same direction as before.

  "Master Krias?" he said. "Could you raise a palace into the air and make it float there?"

  "Nobody can do that now, sheep-boy," the ring said. "Not here, not without Malkar's aid, I mean. And I won't invoke Malkar, not for you or for anybody!"

  Cashel cleared his throat. "I wouldn't ask you to," he said apologetically. "I was just wondering. Ah... I'm not sure it's good for people to live like that anyway."

  "All decent people can do now in the Underworld," Krias continued, talking perhaps to himself but loud enough that Cashel could hear the words by straining, "is to keep it shut off from the waking world. And Landure the Guardian is dead."

  Ilna twisted out of the narrow crack and settled her tunics. They'd become disarrayed by brushing through the walls of rock. Merota waited with her hands folded and her eyes wide, saying nothing.

  The walls of the cavern were banded; several of the narrow layers exuded light. It was faint as foxfire but sufficient as a contrast to the total darkness of the crevice.

  Ilna rubbed a lighted streak, thinking she'd feel powdery lichen. There was nothing but the grittiness of stone.

  Chalcus slipped through, turning as soon as he entered the greater cavity. He chuckled and slid his sword back into its scabbard. "I don't think we'll have a problem with them, good ladies," he said.

  "Chalcus?" the girl said. Her quiet voice almost drowned in its own whispering echoes. "Did you kill them?"

  "Kill them again, child?" the chanteyman said cheerfully. "That I did not, when I saw that Tirling was the leader of them coming after us. He's broad as an ox, is Tirling, and nigh as stupid even when his throat hadn't been cut. They were a determined lot, our crewmen. I figured that if Tirling was bound to wedge himself into a crack that Mistress Ilna and myself found tight passage, who was I to hinder him?"

  "Let's go," Ilna said, nodding toward the farther end of the cavern. She didn't know where it went, but a breeze came from somewhere. The other end wasn't going to be worse than the place they'd just escaped.

  "Aye, mistress," Chalcus said, stepping into the lead without comment. "You know, there were times I'd have cut Tirling's throat myself, so stupid and lazy did I find him. It would be a wonderful gift to the king's fleet if all the rowers showed the dedication to their task that Tirling did when he crammed himself into a place he couldn't possibly fit."

  "There were times," Ilna said, "that I thought the world would be a better place if I could put people in place the way I do threads. I've learned, though, master pirate, that I liked that world worse than I did the one I was born in."

  They went on, going slightly downward more often than they went up so far as Ilna could tell--but she knew from past experience that she couldn't tell much at all, here on Yole. The walls of the cavern were hard stone. The surfaces were generally smooth, but knobs swelled from the floor in some places like giant toadstools.

  "Now, how would you say this cave was made, ladies?" Chalcus asked, walking a pace or two ahead. The cavern was generally broad enough for the three of them to go abreast, but its twists and turns meant frequent blind corners. Chalcus wanted room for his sword-strokes if the need arose.

  "I wouldn't," Ilna said. "I've never seen anything like this. It's sandstone."

  "Nor I," said the chanteyman. "Well, we shan't quibble at the gifts the Lady gives us, shall we?"

  Ilna snorted at the thought of the Great Gods creating this place as a bolthole for Chalcus and his companions to escape. Still, something had wormed a passage through hard rock that water wouldn't dissolve. Natural forces of some sort, she supposed; but neither water nor wind, and the walls were too smooth for this to be some sort of fracture from the earth moving.

 
; Aloud she said, "I suppose that's as good an explanation as any."

  "Aye, we'll all three of us build her an altar when we've won free, shall we?" Chalcus said with a laugh. But he walked at the front like a hunting lynx, and Ilna's hands bunched and loosed the soft, strong cord of her noose as she paced along behind Merota.

  The cavern went on. Ilna realized that she'd assumed it was leading somewhere; and so it must be, but not nearly as soon as she'd thought. The rock continued to supply light--sometimes more, sometimes less. One of the glowing layers formed the floor of a stretch a bowshot long. Ilna saw the silhouette of her feet with each step forward.

  Occasionally water oozed from between the bands of rock. The first time they passed it by. The second time Merota said softly that she was thirsty. They stopped and held Ilna's scarf to the wall until the wool had sucked up water for them to chew out of the fabric.

  It wasn't much--the source was slow and the cave's dry air absorbed the liquid almost as quickly as the scarf could. It was what they had, though, so it would be sufficient.

  Merota didn't complain. As for Chalcus--

  "Around Cape Ice in frost and snow," the chanteyman sang, soft and sweet as Garric's pipes. "Around that cape we all must go...."

  They walked on steadily. When Chalcus finished a song, he started another. "Oh stretch your backs and haul away, and make your port and take your pay...."

  "Shall I sing with you, Chalcus?" Merota said after a pause. "We could sing The Gambling Suitor like you taught me."

  "Ah, child, not this time, if you please," the chanteyman said. His voice was hoarse beneath the lilt when he spoke, though when he sang it rang as clear as a warbler's trill. "Leave me be to show off on my own, if you will, for I'm a vain man."

  And so he is, Ilna thought. But he's a man first, and that's not a small thing in this world.

  They came to a patch of wall where the bands of rock swirled and jumbled like burl in a piece of walnut. The light from within was brighter, throwing the dark striations into sharp relief. Ilna frowned.

  "I don't know about you ladies," Chalcus said at last, "but I'm about done in. Shall we make our beds here for the night and go on in the morning?"

  He knows perfectly well how we are, because he just glanced back and saw Merota wobbling with fatigue. Aloud Ilna said, "Yes, but let's keep on till we find another water seep."

  Ilna didn't like the patch of twisted light on the wall. Water was a good reason--a reason she could point to--to go on, so she didn't mention the way the shadow patterns made her feel.

  "Aye," said Chalcus, nodding as he sauntered forward again. "I smell water just up ahead."

  Merota didn't move. She was staring at the pattern on the wall with a hunger that didn't belong on a face so young and innocent.

  "Merota," Ilna said sharply. "Go on."

  The child still remained where she was, "Now!"

  Ilna stepped between Merota and the patch of rock. Only then did she finally come back to waking reality with a shudder.

  "Oh, Ilna!" she said, staring up at the older woman's stern face. "I was..."

  She frowned. "I don't remember where I was."

  "No place you should have been," Ilna said, shepherding the girl along with a hand on her shoulder. "We'll all be better for water and some sleep."

  "And water we have!" the chanteyman called at another bend in the passageway. "Would I could say it's a gusher like the spring on my uncle's farm on Shengy, but it's wet and will do us, I trust."

  Thirsty as they were, it was still almost more effort than benefit to trap moisture in the cloth and suck it away. They didn't have many other demands on their time, of course.

  Chalcus stripped Merota's sandals off and examined the child's soles with a practiced eye, prodding gently with his thumbs. "They'll do, I suppose," he said, giving Merota a friendly pat on the instep as he turned her loose. "I was afraid you'd have bruised yourself on this hard stone, but you walk like a feather, and it's saved you."

  He cocked his head toward Ilna. "And you, mistress?" he asked. The soft light gave the chanteyman's smile an incongruous fairy quality.

  Ilna shrugged. "My feet are all right," she said. Then--and she didn't know why, it was unlike her to say anything at all about herself--she went on, "I understand cloth, Master Chalcus, better than anyone else you'll ever know. But rock like this--"

  She waved her fingertips toward the cavern's wall.

  "--if it has feelings, it hates me; and such feelings as I have toward it, that is hatred too."

  The chanteyman frowned. "Then this journey we're making must be very difficult for you," he said. "Sorry I am to hear that, lass. I didn't know."

  Ilna sniffed. "I expect life to be difficult," she said without particular emphasis. "And in that, at least, it's rarely disappointed me."

  Chalcus chuckled. He rubbed Merota's tousled hair and said, "The sooner we sleep, the sooner we'll rise to get to back to the open air. Goodnight, ladies."

  Ilna wrapped herself in her cloak, lying beside Merota; Chalcus settled on the child's other side. As tired and hungry as they were, they couldn't keep watch; but a predator that tried to harm Merota would have to get past one or the other of the adults. Whatever tried that would find it an expensive meal.

  Ilna hadn't been sure she could sleep. She could, and it was dreamless.

  It wasn't sound or even the absence of Merota's warmth that awakened Ilna, but rather change at a level below even her sleeping consciousness. A pattern had shifted.

  And Merota was gone.

  "Chalcus," she said, but the chanteyman was already rising. His swordblade was a tongue of curved light.

  With no more sound than a weft thread sliding through the warp, Ilna paced back in the direction they'd come. Merota stood in front of the wall of twisted light.

  "Merota!" Ilna called with a rush of relief. She'd been sure that the girl was irretrievably lost, snatched away by--something, nothing; by the fabric of the cave itself.

  Instead of answering or even looking at her companions, Merota stepped into the wall and disappeared. The pattern of light and shadow swirled momentarily, then froze in the form it had first taken.

  Shouting like a madman, Chalcus leaped forward and hammered the stone with the heel of his left hand. His sword was raised to slash at the least sign of threat or give in the wall which had swallowed the child.

  It was solid rock, as Ilna had known.

  "Get back!" she said, facing the lighted wall. Her hands looped the noose around her waist in a running knot, then twitched separate lengths of cord from her left sleeve. "You're in the way. I have to see the pattern!"

  'See' wasn't the right word for the way Ilna viewed, lived, patterns. She was vaguely aware that the chanteyman had stepped clear, but even that didn't matter any more. A portion would be enough for Ilna to understand the whole. There was no longer rock before her, merely a passage of light swirling in a way that was as obvious as the stars wheeling on a clear night once she--

  Ilna stepped into what had been stone, entering a chamber out of time and space.

  "Hello, Merota," she said mildly. "I've come to take you home."

  "Ilna?" the girl said from the nest of inward-pointing spines. "Ilna, I can't move!"

  What is this that came unsummoned? demanded a voice in Ilna's head. It was as cold as the heart of a dead star.

  She was in a hollow nodule. The walls were varicolored crystals like the interior of a geode, but these glowed and quivered with life. Scores of them had extended into spikes as thin and sharp as yucca leaves, enclosing Merota with their points.

  "I'm responsible for the child," Ilna said. She could hear the crystals rustle all around her; the light at the heart of each pulsed to an individual rhythm. "I've come to bring her back where she belongs."

  This cannot have come through the web, the voice said. It was the melding of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of inhuman minds speaking as one. The web is closed, and we are inviolable.

 
Ilna laughed. "Then I'm not here," she said. "Release the girl and we'll go away. Then you'll never have to know if I'm an illusion."

  If rock feels anything for me, it's hatred. And I hate rock, beyond any question.

  "Oh, Ilna," Merota said. "I'm so sorry...."

  Rock quivered. Words that were not sound danced and whispered just beneath Ilna's understanding. It was like listening to a dying fire; hisses and sighs, and sometimes a muted pop.

  We will release the child, the voice said. Come and take her away.

  Colored spines began to withdraw, returning to squat forms against the nodule's walls. Three remained at their full length, centered on Merota's chest. The light at their cores was blood red.

  Ilna tossed up the pattern she'd been knotting while the crystals whispered and lied to her. The cords spun in the air, lighted by the rock itself.

  The nodule screamed. Crystals twisted, shattered, slumped like butter melting. One of the swords of red light imprisoning Merota wrenched in on itself to stab through its own base, shivering into a thousand fragments from which the light died slowly.

  Merota pitched toward Ilna, bawling with terror. Ilna had been holding her ears in pointless reaction to pain that wasn't sound. She threw her arms around the child, glad to have something to hold that was life of the kind she understood.

  The nodule was growing dim. The light that remained was the muddy color of a badly-dyed garment.

  "Help me Ilna help me!" Merota bawled.

  The rock--the world--spasmed. Ilna and the child flew forward, sliding on slick stone. Chalcus caught them left-handed and held them to his chest.

  "Ladies?" he said. "You're all right?"

  Ilna's eyes readapted. She gave Merota a pat and set her free, then shrugged out of the chanteyman's grip.

  "You can put up your sword now, Master Chalcus," she said. "I appreciate the thought, though."

  The panel that took Merota was dull as sand. Cracks webbed its surface like those in shattered ice. Bits and then more bits crumbled away from the wall. The whole section was slumping into gravel.