Yuan ripped the front off his silken battle tunic and used it to dab his father’s blood off the blade. When he finished, he sheathed his sword, then carefully folded the cloth and slipped it beneath his leather corselet.
The adjutant bowed to Tang, his eyes now as hard as his father’s. “I obey your command, My Prince.”
Tang honored the youth by returning his bow. “The Minister of War shall—” The prince had to interrupt himself to take a deep breath and regain control of his churning stomach. “He shall hear of your dedication to duty.”
Yuan’s eyes showed no sign of softening, but they did shift away from the prince’s face toward the water, where a dozen shapes were rapidly drifting toward General Fui’s body. At first, Tang took the forms for floating logs. Then he noticed the eyes and nostrils protruding above the bog scum, and also the powerful tails snaking back and forth behind their bodies.
The first beast slid between the prince’s dugout and Yuan’s raft. Silently, it took Fui’s head into its jaws and slid beneath the dark water, vanishing from sight almost before Tang realized he was looking at an alligator.
Yuan reached down to pull the rest of his father’s body back onto the raft, then almost lost a hand as another of the monsters latched on to the corpse’s shoulder. The cadaver slid off the logs and disappeared beneath the surface in a quick swirl. A second creature, easily as long as Tang’s dugout, dove after the body-stealer, and the water erupted into a bloody, churning froth as the two animals tore the cadaver to pieces.
Tang finally lost control of his rebellious stomach and turned away while it purged itself—then nearly lost his head as a pair of tooth-filled jaws rose from the water to snap at his face. He slashed at it ineffectually with the sword in his hand, and his boatpushers stepped over to hold the thing at bay while he finished retching. Behind the prince sounded a startled scream, followed by a loud splash and the brief gurgle of a man’s voice.
An astonished murmur rustled through the swamp; then half the soldiers in the company cried out in fear. The rippling siffle of halberds slashing water filled the air. Several men fell into the pond and shrieked as they were dragged beneath the surface.
When Tang’s stomach finally finished with him, he wiped his mouth on a boatpusher’s sleeve, then turned to see his entire company of soldiers besieged by alligators. The men were standing back-to-back in the center of all five rafts, thrusting the tips of their long halberds at the throng of circling alligators—several of which looked longer than the vessels themselves. Many of the logs were smeared with blood, while the water was littered with broken halberd shafts, ribbons of shredded silk, and alligators writhing in pain.
As Tang watched, a swimming alligator whipped its body around, driving its head and forequarters onto a raft. The attack was met by a flurry of driving halberds, most of which pierced the beast’s armored hide and sank to a depth of several inches. The monster clutched at the logs with the claws of its stubby forelegs and dragged itself forward. The men braced themselves, trying to shove their blades deeper into their attacker’s flesh.
The creature ignored the assault and continued to claw its way onto the raft. One warrior lost his footing and slid across the raft, where another alligator seized his ankle and dragged him, screaming, into the scum-covered waters. Several others, finding their halberds’ damp shafts slipping backward through their grasp, dropped their polearms to reach for their swords. Only one man could drive his weapon deep enough to cause the behemoth any injury. The alligator simply snapped its head to one side and jerked the weapon out of the soldier’s hands, then retreated into the water.
Tang peered over the side of his dugout and saw several alligators floating alongside, their ravenous gazes searching for something to snatch. Fortunately, the punt’s sides were high enough to conceal his vulnerable legs, or one of the beasts would certainly have pulled him into the swamp by now. As it was, he took the precaution of raising his arms above his chest and ordering his boatpushers to do the same, lest one of the creatures attempt to snatch a dangling hand and capsize the punt.
“Perhaps Wise Prince cares to give order?”
Yuan stood in the center of his own blood-streaked raft, apparently oblivious to the screams of the legless man at his feet. The young officer was watching Tang with what could only be called a look of impertinent impatience, as though he understood exactly what needed to be done and knew his commander for too much of a fool to see it.
Tang scowled in thought, determined not to lose any more face by asking Yuan’s advice. The prince could not order an advance without forcing the men to step within reach of the alligators’ snapping jaws, but neither did he see any sense in remaining where they were and allowing the monsters to pluck them off the rafts one-by-one. What they needed was magic. A wu-jen could drive the beasts away, so his soldiers could get on with the important business of finding and slaying the dragon.
An angry light flared in Yuan’s eyes. “When enemy attacks, it is customary for commander to issue order.”
“Alligators are not enemy!” Tang snapped, waving his sword at the beasts between their vessels. “They are stupid animals.”
A loud thump sounded in the bottom of Tang’s dugout. He looked down to see a scaly brown cord gathering itself into a coil. Whether because of the lasal haze in his mind or the shock of having the thing drop into his boat, the prince did not recognize the writhing tendril until it showed the pink lining of its mouth. Tang calmly brought his sword down, catching the snake behind the head.
The prince did not enjoy snakes as much as he did lizards, but he knew enough about the species to recognize the white-mouthed viper as more of a swimmer than a tree climber. He scowled and looked up, then cried out in surprise as three more dark, writhing ropes dropped out of the canopy overhead. One of the snakes splashed into the water beside the dugout, where it was promptly snapped up by an alligator, but the other two plopped into the bottom of the punt.
Almost before he realized it, Tang’s sword had lashed out to sever the head from one serpent. The other recovered from its fall quickly enough to bury its fangs into a boatpusher’s leg. Unlike the other two snakes, this one was gray, with a black diamond pattern and rattles on its tail. The victim screeched and reached for his dagger. Before the man could draw his weapon, Tang grasped the viper behind its head and yanked it free. He tossed the serpent into the water, where a ravenous alligator quickly avenged its attack on the prince’s servant.
The snake bite bled profusely, instantly coating the boatpusher’s foot in sticky red syrup. The man opened his mouth to thank Tang, then cried out and dropped into the bottom of the punt. He clutched his leg and began to squirm, causing the dugout to rock dangerously.
“Stop, fool!” Tang ordered. By the panicked cries echoing across the pond, the prince knew that his boatpusher was not the only soldier to suffer a snake bite. “Do you mean to capsize us?”
The man looked up. “What does it matter? I die anyway. We all die!”
Tang slapped the man. “Poison makes bite bleed and hurt, but it does not kill—unless you spill us into swamp with alligators!” Though he was not particularly fond of serpents, the prince’s poison trade had taught him more than a little about their venom. “Now stand up and return to duty.”
Tang glanced up and saw another ropy form dropping out of the gloomy boughs overhead. He caught this snake on his sword and flicked it away, then quickly returned his eyes to the canopy. Though it was difficult to see into the murk above, it seemed to him that the branches were alive with slinking, writhing forms, all working their way into positions over his small flotilla of rafts. The behavior seemed most unnatural for snakes, which were usually more anxious to avoid trouble than start it.
Tang hazarded a glance at the rafts and was horrified to see his soldiers in a panic. They were lying prone on the logs, groaning over their bleeding bites and begging their ancestors for help, or they were dancing madly about on the logs, hacking at serpents and t
rying to stay beyond the reach of the voracious alligators. Many had failed already. The water was thick with severed limbs and shredded leather corselets, and some of the behemoths in the water were even beginning to drift away, each clutching a drowned man in its crooked jaws.
“This is dragon’s doing!” Tang yelled. “He fears to show himself!”
Another pair of snakes dropped into his dugout. He dispatched one, while the bitten boatpusher used his pole to fling the other to the alligators.
“Take up poles and go to cavern!” the prince commanded. “Do not fear snakes! If you are bitten, you can still fight.”
Incredibly, the soldiers ignored their attackers and obeyed. The alligators continued to pull men into the water, and the snakes continued to rain down on their heads, but the rafts started to drift forward. Now that the company had orders, the entire troop was focused on its goal, and it did not seem to matter how many of their comrades fell. Thinking that perhaps he had a natural aptitude for military leadership, Prince Tang flicked another serpent into the water and commanded his boatpushers forward, then turned to face the cavern.
He found Cypress roosting on the toppled tree outside the cavern. The dragon looked half-again as large as he had in the spicehouse, with scales so dark they seemed almost shadows in the murky swamp light. Perched beside Cypress were a pair of small wyverns that had been fluttering about the swamp during the prince’s earlier visits. The creatures looked like huge iguanas, save that their thick tails ended in needle-sharp barbs and they had wings instead of forelegs.
Cypress’s empty eye sockets swung toward the prince. Am I to assume you don’t have the ylang oil?
Tang’s knees nearly buckled. His grip grew so weak that he dropped his sword into the bottom of the boat.
“I have come for Lady Feng. Then we talk about oil.”
There is nothing to talk about. Without the oil, you will find only death.
“I prefer that fate to disgrace of leaving venerable mother with you.”
Tang retrieved his weapon, quietly relieved that Cypress had not yet recovered his voice. Without his breath weapon and magic spells, the dragon would not prove so difficult to defeat. The prince glanced over his shoulder, and when he saw the remains of his small company still behind him, he raised his sword. His hand was trembling so badly that the blade wobbled like the mast of a tempest-tossed caravel, but he did not let that stop him from pointing it at Cypress.
“There is enemy! Do not be frightened. He cannot spray you with acid, and he cannot hurt you with magic!”
Tang’s soldiers raised their spears and cheered bravely, then allowed their rafts to drift to a stop and glowered at the dracolich. Cypress opened his muzzle slightly, returning the troop’s glare with a mocking, yellow-toothed grin. The two wyverns licked their chops, and the alligators pulled two more men into the water.
The prince scowled at his men, unable to understand why they had stopped advancing. “Attack!”
“In what manner, Honorable Prince?” The question came from Yuan, who stood on the raft closest to Tang’s dugout.
The order seemed clear enough to the prince. “Attack with swords and halberds, of course!”
Yuan allowed himself the briefest shake of his head, then turned to the troops. “Number One Raft, assault to right. Number Two Raft to center. Number Three to left, and others remain in reserve.” When the men began to maneuver as ordered, the adjutant bowed to Tang. “Perhaps Brave Prince wishes to move to safer position behind reserves?”
Tang almost said yes, then remembered how his men had struggled to hide their laughter during General Fui’s unfortunate slip of tongue. “No. I lead attack, as I say earlier.”
Tang ordered his punt forward and was surprised by the strength of the fear that boiled up inside him. It suffused his entire being, filling him with a hot, queasy sensation as foul as bile. He felt flushed and dizzy and achy, as though he were physically ill, and it seemed that his whole body had suddenly gone weak. Cypress remained on his roost, flanked by his two wyverns and calmly awaiting the battle, his empty eye sockets never straying from the prince’s dugout.
Tang chewed another lasal leaf, hoping that the sickening dread he felt was the result of a mind attack and not his own weak constitution. The haze inside his mind grew thicker, but his fear did not subside.
Cypress allowed the prince’s dugout to advance almost into halberd-hurling range, then nudged the two wyverns. The beasts folded their wings and tipped forward, slipping into the swamp as quietly as alligators. They dove beneath the surface, then swam toward Tang’s boat, the bristling crests along their spines slicing through the scummy water like shark fins.
Tang dropped his sword and grabbed a boatpusher’s halberd, then willed his heavy legs to carry him to the front of the punt. He braced his feet against the walls and tried to ignore the voice calling through the lasal haze inside his head, urging him to remember himself and take his proper place behind the reserves. The prince raised his halberd and watched the wyverns approach. They came more or less straight on, their spine crests cutting through the water to each side of the dugout. He angled his weapon to the right and thrust the blade into the water, aiming for the space between the creature’s shoulder blades.
The halberd bit deep into the wyvern’s thick hide and nearly jumped from Tang’s hands. An unexpected scream of wild, brutal exhilaration burst from the prince’s lips. He clamped down on the weapon’s shaft and dropped into a squat, both to drive the blade deeper and to keep from being jerked out of the dugout. The creature’s head erupted from the water, filling the swamp with a loud, sizzling hiss.
Tang jerked his halberd free and swung the blade, axe-like, at the creature’s head. The beast retracted its sinuous neck. Instead of counterstriking, it hissed again, wagging a forked tongue as long as a pennon flag.
Tang had seen whiptail lizards wag their tongues at prey often enough to know what was coming next. He dove into the bottom of the dugout and heard the wyvern’s barbed tail swishing over his back. The sound ended in a slurpy thud, then a boatpusher—the snake-bitten one, judging by his delirious voice—screamed.
With a trembling hand, the prince grabbed his sword, dropped it, grabbed it again, and came up swinging in time to see the wyvern’s tail jerk his boatpusher from the punt. The fellow landed facedown and did not move. So deadly and quick was the wyvern’s poison that the man puffed up before Tang’s eyes. The flesh on his hands and neck grew black and slimy, while the red stain blossoming around the man’s head suggested his nose was bleeding profusely.
The wyvern flicked its victim off its tail, then dove back beneath the water and swam toward Number Three Raft. Tang remembered the other beast and spun around, half-expecting to feel a tail barb piercing his own flesh. He found only an empty dugout, with a forsaken halberd and a pool of black slime to mark where the second boatpusher had been standing a moment before.
Tang’s earlier jubilation had vanished like smoke into fog; now he felt helpless and frightened. If a halberd could barely scratch a wyvern, how would it pierce a dragon’s thick armor? He had been a fool to come into this swamp without a wu-jen.
The men on Number Two and Number Three Rafts voiced their battle cries and thrust their halberds into the swamp. A pair of tails lashed out of the water almost as one, each driving a barb through a soldier’s leather armor. Tang saw scales rippling as the wyverns pumped their victims full of poison, then a flurry of blades as his soldiers hacked at the beasts’ sinuous tails.
In the next instant, the back end of Number Three Raft rose on a wyvern’s back. The creature’s wings beat the swamp as it struggled to raise the boat higher. Men tumbled into the water, screaming and slashing at alligators. Finally, when the raft had grown light enough, the wyvern twisted sideways and flipped it.
Number Two Raft suffered a similar fate; then the two creatures dove beneath the surface and swam toward the rafts Yuan had held in reserve.
Tang grabbed a halberd and used i
t to push his punt after Number One Raft, which had nearly reached Cypress’s roost. It was difficult to say whether the dragon was watching the approaching vessel or not. He held his head turned to one side and slightly cocked, so that one empty eye socket was turned toward the dark water and the other on the murky canopy. His scaly lips were slightly curled, as though he found the cacophony of howling voices a pleasant evening serenade.
Number One Raft scraped past a heap of shark skeletons and stopped beside Cypress’s roost, less than twenty paces from the dragon. Several men quickly formed a wall at the front of the craft while their companions gathered behind them.
Tang pushed harder, trying to catch up before they launched their attack. The voice in his lasal-clouded head kept urging him to turn back. The closer he came to his foe, the less he cared about the disrespect his men had shown him earlier—or the shame he would bring upon himself by failing to rescue his mother. Nevertheless, the prince continued forward, not because he cared about his men or was suddenly determined to prove that he was no coward, but because he knew that the only way to leave the swamp alive was to kill his foe.
Tang had almost caught Number One Raft when the men in the front hurled their halberds like spears. As the shafts arced toward the dragon, half a dozen soldiers leaped onto the toppled tree and rushed forward to attack. The boatpushers again started to move their clumsy vessel forward.
Cypress calmly brought a wing around to shield himself from the flying halberds. The steel blades pierced the leathery scales easily enough, but lacked the force to drag the heavy shafts through the tough hide and penetrate the dragon’s body. One weapon splashed into the swamp, but most simply lodged themselves in a wing and dangled there like needles in an oxhide.
Cypress lowered his wing and swept the line of charging warriors off the toppled tree, then hopped off his roost and landed in the middle of the raft. The boat settled a few inches beneath the water, but did not sink, and its occupants whirled on their foe in a flurry of flashing steel. Growling and hissing like one of his wyverns, the dragon lashed out with tail and wings and sent bodies splashing into the water on all sides.
The Veiled Dragon Page 20
