Ruha caught him by the shoulder. “If that blade did not affect the corpses, it will not harm Cypress. He is also undead.”
“Thank you. I would feel most foolish.” The mandarin gestured down the corridor. “Please to make most of soldier’s sacrifice.”
Ruha turned down the hall and tried a dozen barred doors before the captured man finally stopped screaming.
There was a brief silence; then the warrior behind Hsieh said, “Dead men follow us.”
“Cypress fears to destroy oil sack,” Hsieh observed. “Otherwise, he sprays us with acid.”
“True, but I doubt he is willing to let us escape.” Ruha started down the corridor again, judging they had less than forty paces before it ended in a windowless stone wall. “And we will soon run out of room. I fear the back of this building stands against Temple Hill.”
Hsieh caught Ruha by the shoulder. “You stop dead men. We find way out.”
Ruha glanced down the corridor at the long line of zombies. The closest was only ten paces away, but was slow and shambling. She nodded. As Hsieh’s warrior began hacking at a door, the witch picked up a small stone lying among the refuse against the wall. She used it to scrape a line up both walls to within a few inches of the ceiling. She connected them with another line on the floor, then laid the rock upon it. The leading corpse was only two steps away.
A muffled clamor sounded somewhere in the structure far above, presumably Cypress tearing the roof away. As much as Ruha wanted to glance at the ceiling, there was no time. She spoke the incantation of her stone spell. The rock on the floor disappeared, then a shimmering gray wall formed between the three lines the witch had traced on the floor. The first corpse, a dark-haired cult member with an ugly skull wound, arrived at the barrier. He managed to push his head and one arm through before the magic wall turned as solid as granite. The zombie remained there, reaching for the witch’s oil sack and moaning in the plaintive, incoherent voice of a tormented spirit.
Another crash reverberated down from above, this time followed by the clatter of falling rubble.
“He is digging his way down through the building!” Ruha cried, spinning toward Hsieh.
She completed the turn in time to see an iron bolt shoot through the breach Hsieh’s man had hacked in the door. The dart buried its head in the opposite wall, and the muffled clatter of a bow crank sounded from inside the chamber. The warrior reached through the hole and lifted the crossbar off its supports.
“Get on with you!” cried the man on the other side of the door. His voice sounded both fearful and old. “The next one won’t miss!”
Hsieh’s soldier shoved the door open and stormed inside, yelling, “You dare to attack Shou mandarin!”
A heavy thud shook the building; then the ceiling began to crack and groan beneath a great weight. Ruha and Hsieh followed the warrior into a small, windowless shop filled with the cluttered shelves of an apothecary. The soldier was leaning over a chest-high counter, holding his sword to the throat of a mousy, squint-eyed man. On the counter lay an empty crossbow and a crucible heating over the flame of an alcohol lamp.
As soon as she saw the lamp’s blue flame, Ruha’s heart skipped a beat. If she could use such a hot fire to cast her most powerful sun spell, even Cypress would be helpless to defend himself. She stepped toward the apothecary, but Hsieh spoke before she could ask the old man if he had any brimstone.
“Where is Number Two Exit?” Hsieh demanded, his gaze darting from one cramped corner to the next.
“Isn’t one.”
“What is this material?” Hsieh stepped to the outside wall and ran his fingers over the smooth, white-washed surface.
“Wattle and daub,” the apothecary answered.
When the mandarin did not seem to understand, Ruha said, “A sort of mud plaster.”
The planks above their heads creaked, then began to pop and crack. The chandelier above the apothecary’s counter started to swing, and Ruha looked up to see the exposed joist logs bowing directly over their heads. The dragon knew exactly where they were, and it took the witch only an instant to guess how. If the smell of ylang oil had led her to Hsieh earlier, then certainly the dragon, with his much larger nose, could track them by the same scent.
A tremendous splintering filled the room as five huge talons pierced the ceiling. The apothecary wailed and dropped to his knees behind the counter, and Hsieh shoved his warrior toward the outside wall.
“Kick hole.”
The claws began to rip through planks of thick wood as if they were made of paper. Hsieh’s soldier sheathed his sword and stepped back to get a running start, and Ruha leaned over the counter to look at the cowering apothecary.
“Have you brimstone?” When the man only looked at her with terrified eyes, she yelled, “Brimstone powder—now!”
The dragon’s fist closed around a joist log and started to tug. The beam, a rough-hewn pine trunk as thick as an ogre’s leg, groaned and bowed, but it would not break—at least not easily. Hsieh’s man charged across the room, then picked up both feet and attacked with a flying, two-legged stomp kick. The daub cracked beneath his heels, and he crashed through the wall to disappear outside.
The apothecary shoved an open bottle of yellow powder onto the counter and ducked out of sight again. Ruha grabbed the lamp from beneath the crucible and pulled the wick stopper. The cloth was still saturated with alcohol, so the flame continued to burn as she poured the fuel into the brimstone bottle.
A deep, rumbling grunt shook the shop. The joist log snapped with a mighty crack, and the ceiling sagged beneath Cypress’s weight. The dragon tore a handful of wood away, creating a hole twice the size of a door.
Hsieh stepped to Ruha’s side. “You must come now!”
“In a moment.” Holding the saturated brimstone in one hand and the flickering lamp wick in the other, Ruha turned to face Cypress. “First I must stop the dragon.”
“That will not be so easy as you think!” Cypress’s voice boomed through the empty hole as loud as thunder. I have learned to be wary of you.
The dragon’s second sentence tolled through Ruha’s head like a striking bell, shattering her concentration. She tried to summon the incantation of her most powerful sun spell, but could not.
Did you think I had to see your eyes to attack your mind? The words echoed back and forth through Ruha’s head, building on each other, growing louder and sharper with every reverberation. Any contact will do.
Ruha tried to bring the flickering wick to the brimstone bottle, but her body did not seem to hear her wishes. Her hands remained a foot apart, shaking with the memory of what she had intended, yet unable to obey. The wick in her hand sputtered and smoked darkly as it ran out of alcohol and began to consume itself instead.
“Why do you wait?” Hsieh demanded. “Cast spell!”
The sound of cracking wood filled the chamber once again, and the ceiling sagged almost to their heads as the dragon lay on the floor above. When Ruha did not move, Hsieh apparently realized what was wrong. He pulled a lasal leaf from his pocket and slipped it between her lips. The witch allowed it to fall from her mouth; if they were to have any chance of escaping the dragon, she could not allow a lasal haze to cloud her mind.
Hsieh watched the leaf flutter to the floor, then pulled his dagger from its sheath.
“So sorry, Lady Witch.” He cut the rope hanging over her shoulder and took the sack of oil. “Must not let dragon have ylang oil.”
The dragon’s withered hand came through the hole and snaked toward the witch. The mandarin quickly stepped away, then turned and threw himself through the opening in the wall.
Cypress’s talons stopped a foot short of Ruha, and the din assailing her head quieted to a dull roar. The lamp wick hissed and flickered and began to shrink. The witch considered trying to resist the dragon’s mind attack, but he was too powerful to defeat. Instead, she let all her defenses down, envisioning her mind as the great hall of an empty Heartlands castle, where e
ven the slightest sound reverberated like a drum.
What is happening to you? Cypress demanded. Where is the oil?
Ruha made no reply, allowing the dragon’s words to crash through her mind with such force they shattered the walls of the hall she had envisioned.
The ruse worked. Cypress’s hand suddenly pulled away, and the cacophony in Ruha’s mind quieted as he sniffed out the ylang oil. Her hand obeyed when she tried to move it; even the dragon could not focus his attention in two different places at once. She pushed the bottom of the wick into the mixture of brimstone and alcohol. The flame quickly returned to its steady blue gleam, but the witch forced herself not to think about her sun spell. The dragon was still inside her head, and he would feel the effort of summoning the incantation from her memory.
Ruha had to wait only an instant before Cypress’s head shot through the hole, his nostrils flaring as he tried to sniff out the fading scent of Hsieh’s oil-soaked body. The witch hurled her bottle at an eye socket. The dragon flinched away, and the glass shattered against the side of his head. The burning wick instantly touched off the mixture of alcohol and sulfur, filling the chamber with a searing blue-yellow flash.
Cypress bellowed in shock and pulled his burning face out of the chamber. Ruha stepped over to the hole, summoning her incantation as she went. She saw the dragon’s head more than two stories above, shaking madly from side to side, trailing long tails of sapphire and amber flame. The witch thrust her hand toward the fire and spoke her incantation.
The blaze erupted into a blistering orb of white-hot flame, as brilliant as the sun in the sky and twice as large. The dragon wailed in anguish. When he raised his claws to his face, they caught fire and started to burn with a flickering yellow flame. He started to dance about, and Ruha heard a tremendous crash in the next room as one of his heavy feet came through the ceiling. Burning scales began to flutter off his head and touch off fires on the floors above. Cypress raised his wings, then roared in fury and launched himself into the air.
The witch turned away from the conflagration and saw the astonished apothecary standing behind his counter, his rheumy eyes fixed on the fiery hole over his head. She pulled him from behind the counter.
“Come along. We had better leave this place,” she said, dragging the old man toward the hole in the wall. “Perhaps you would be kind enough to guide me to the Jailgates?”
Sixteen
Deep in the Jailgates’ thick foundations, Ruha caught herself staring at Yanseldara’s cataleptic face. The Lady Lord lay in an infirmary bed, a honey-haired beauty with the slender face and sharply delicate features of a half-elf. Save for the amethyst circles beneath her eyes, her skin was as pale as pearl. Her cheeks were hollow from the lack of eating, her lips as gray as ash, her brow lined by the strain of a wicked and endless nightmare. She could easily lack the strength to carry a message to Lady Feng, even if Vaerana would agree to try Hsieh’s potion.
Ruha turned to the Lady Constable who, despite having been knocked through a mud-brick wall by Cypress’s tail, sat in a chair next to Yanseldara’s bed. A priest had already examined and straightened the swollen purple mass that had once been Vaerana’s knee, but Minister Hsieh had volunteered to sew up her many deep cuts. He was sitting beside her now, smiling contentedly each time he pushed the needle into a long gash along her jawline.
Ruha said, “Vaerana, I am sorry to interrupt while you are being attended to, but we have something to discuss.”
“Please to wait until I finish here,” said Hsieh. “Or scar will be most unflattering.”
The mandarin’s voice was hoarse and raspy, no doubt from breathing the dusky smoke that pervaded even the fortress’s underground chambers. Elversult was burning—a good part of it at least—and there was no escaping the acrid murk. The fumes hung over the city as heavy as a fog, creeping past shuttered windows and seeping under barred doors to fill every room in every building with a choking gray cloud.
Perhaps that was a blessing, given the battle stench upon which Ruha would surely have been gagging if her nose had not been so clogged by bitter soot. With wounded Maces sprawled on the floor as thick as rats or holding each other upright on wooden benches, the chamber looked less like an infirmary than a crowded tavern after a vicious and bloody brawl. Through the smoke haze, the witch saw bandaged stumps where there should have been limbs, melted flesh bubbling up between the links of scorched chainmail, and a hundred more wounds too terrible to look upon for long. Many of the warriors had suffered their injuries when they rode with Vaerana to lure Cypress away from Ruha and Hsieh, but many more had been hurt in cult ambushes. Even now, with Elversult’s loyal citizens struggling to fight the fires Cypress had set in his flaming panic, more than a dozen patrols of Maces continued to battle the marauding bands.
Given the mild severity of her own wound, Ruha would have felt guilty for the healer’s attention she had received the moment she walked in the door—save that her battle was far from over. Her sun spell had driven Cypress into one of the city’s many lakes, but it had not destroyed him. Until the dragon was finally, utterly annihilated, the witch knew better than to think either she or Yanseldara would ever be safe.
Minister Hsieh looped his needle through the last stitch on Vaerana’s jaw, then cut the suture. “You may speak now.” He stood and began to cut the hair away from a long slash in her scalp. “But I advise you not to move head.”
Vaerana scowled at the cascade of blood-matted tresses tumbling past her shoulder. “Are you going to cut it all off?” she growled. Then, to Ruha, “Well?”
Ruha glanced toward Yanseldara’s slumbering form, then reached into her aba and removed the potion Hsieh had given her earlier. “If we are to finish this battle, we must contact Lady Feng.”
Vaerana shook her head, then hissed sharply as Hsieh’s needle dragged across her wound. “You can see for yourself she’s in no condition to be carrying messages.” She gestured at the bed beside her. “Besides, we’ve got Cypress well in hand, thanks to you—though I wish you hadn’t helped him burn down a quarter of Elversult.”
“One does not destroy great evil without great sacrifice,” Hsieh remarked.
“We have not destroyed anything,” Ruha corrected. “Surrounding Cypress while he hides in Hillshadow Lake is not having him ‘in hand.’ It is offering up Pierstar Hallowhand and his men to appease the dragon’s rage.”
Vaerana frowned at the witch. “Didn’t you listen to the last report, Witch? Cypress lost his wings, along with his hands—and underneath that baby sun you made, who knows what’s happening to his head? Pierstar has ballistae and wizards waiting on every shore. As soon as the dragon shows himself above water, they’ll blast him to pieces.” She glowered at the witch, then added, “And they won’t burn down the city.”
“It would not matter if they did,” Ruha replied. “You gain nothing if Pierstar destroys the dragon’s body. Cypress will simply take another; then we will not know where he is until he returns as he did before. To truly defeat our enemy, we must allow Minister Hsieh to contact Lady Feng and ask her to smash the dracolich’s spirit gem.”
Vaerana set her jaw. “Yanseldara’s too weak. I’m not going to risk her life. And even if we only destroy Cypress’s body, at least we’re buying time to find his lair.”
“But what of Lady Feng? Perhaps she has no time.” Hsieh stopped sewing and glanced at the bed next to them. “Perhaps Lady Yanseldara has even less. If Lady Feng uses oil from evening-picked blossoms, love potion does not last long. When it wears off, her spirit must do battle with the dragon’s.”
Vaerana craned her neck to look up at Minister Hsieh, then swore as the movement jerked the needle from his hands. “Don’t you give me any Shou double-talk! You’re only trying to worry me.”
“Vaerana, what he says sounds very true. Why are you being so stubborn?”
No sooner had the witch asked the question than she realized the answer. The Lady Constable felt responsible for Yanseldara’s c
ondition—she had told Ruha as much shortly after their first meeting. On some level, at least, Vaerana wanted to redeem herself by becoming the Lady Lord’s rescuer.
Vaerana glowered at both Hsieh and Ruha for a moment, then folded her arms across her chest. “I’m not being stubborn.” She leaned back to let Hsieh finish stitching her scalp shut. “I’m being careful.”
“Yes, it is good to be careful.” Ruha nodded thoughtfully, then stepped over to Yanseldara’s bed. “She does look very weak, does she not, Minister?”
“It does not matter. Danger is from choking on potion. Even weak bond can carry message between body and spirit.”
“But Yanseldara needs extra strength to battle Cypress, does she not?” Ruha allowed her eyes to pivot toward Vaerana, then raised the potion in her hand. “Or did I misunderstand you when you gave me this?”
If Hsieh perceived Ruha’s intentions, his face showed no sign of it. He frowned slightly, then said, “I think you do misunderstand, Lady Ruha. I say not to worry about Cypress, because we give Lady Yanseldara strength.”
Ruha breathed a silent sigh of relief. “Yes, that is right. I had forgotten.”
“What are you two talking about?” Though Hsieh had stopped sewing, Vaerana remained surprisingly still. “Is there some way to make this safe?”
“More safe,” Hsieh said. “But small risk always remains.”
Ruha saw the interest fading from Vaerana’s eyes.
“The greatest risk, of course, would be to you,” Ruha added quickly. “If Cypress caught on—”
“I don’t care about the risk to me!” Vaerana twisted around to look at Hsieh, who deftly released the needle to keep from tearing her wound. “What will it mean to Yanseldara?”
“She draws strength from your spirit,” Hsieh said, expounding on Ruha’s fabrication. “Much better for her.”
“If there is trouble, you are certain to perish,” Ruha added, trying to make the ruse look as dangerous as possible. “Will you take the chance?”
Vaerana did not even hesitate. “Of course!”
The Veiled Dragon Page 29
