Oaths (Dragon Blood, Book 8)

by Lindsay Buroker

Now that she looked closely, there was nothing there, but for a second, she’d been certain she had felt someone in the distance, someone with Tolemek’s taciturn and occasionally grumpy aura. But as she swept back and forth with her senses, all she detected was empty water.

  Jaxi? Do you sense anything out there?

  Rocks and fish. Seaweed.

  But definitely not people or a boat?

  No.

  “Sardelle?” Cas asked, having stopped when Sardelle stopped.

  “I’m… not sure. I thought I sensed something for a second, but Jaxi didn’t catch it, and I don’t feel it now. Maybe my mind was playing tricks on me.” She did not say more, not wanting to get Cas’s hopes up. Besides, she could have sworn that whatever—or whoever—she had sensed had been underwater. But that couldn’t be unless there had been a ship with a deep draft. But a ship couldn’t have moved away that quickly, and anything that large, she would be able to see with her eyes, even in the night.

  “Sorry, all,” Captain Kaika said, walking back up to join them. “The handsome young man working nights in the port authority office showed me the logs from the last couple of days, and nothing stood out. A few foreign freighters arrived, but familiar ones that come by regularly on their trade routes.” She held up a piece of paper. “I did get their names and berths, just in case we want to visit and check them out. Question the crew. It’s always possible the kidnappers stowed away or paid for legitimate passage… before they turned to their life of crime.”

  Cas took the paper from her. “Let’s check them. Sardelle, you would be able to tell if someone was lying to us, wouldn’t you?”

  Sardelle pulled her gaze back from the breakwater and focused on them. “Most likely, yes.”

  “I’m going to leave that excitement to you two,” Kaika said. “Another handsome man is waiting for me to enjoy dinner with him.” She winked and lifted a hand.

  Cas offered a curt wave and headed toward a gas lamp to check the names under the light.

  Sardelle wanted to head home for dinner with her man, too, but she had promised to help Cas. And wherever Tolemek was, he might need their help badly.

  She couldn’t help but peer out toward the breakwater again as Cas headed off toward the first foreign freighter, wondering what exactly had tugged at her senses out there.

  6

  Tolemek woke with his head pounding and his sinuses feeling like they were stuffed with cotton. He was glad that the room he was in was dim, but that was all he was glad for. As soon as he tried to lift a hand to scrape gunk out of his eyes, a clink sounded, and he met resistance. Shackles.

  His wrists were chained to each other and to his ankles. Another chain locked his ankles to the base of the table. The iron links were rusty, and the chain looked to be decades old, but he doubted tugging at it would break the links. Especially from his awkward position.

  He lay curled on his side on a gritty metal floor, as if someone had dropped him there and left him. Judging by the way his entire body ached, that someone had beaten on him first. Or maybe he was simply stiff from lying there for however many hours it had been. However many days?

  He glanced down at his fingers, remembering the web-like substance that had defeated him. Someone must have washed it off—with some acid, judging by how raw his skin felt—but he could feel small bits still stuck to his hands when he rubbed them together. At least it wasn’t enough to impede him now. Of course, the shackles handled that.

  Tolemek turned his head slightly, trying to pick out his surroundings as he used his fledgling magical powers to stretch out with his senses. They didn’t tell him much, except that he was alone in the room. Or the cabin? The cramped space and metal walls and ceiling made him think of cabins on an ironclad. The bench and table he lay between were both bolted to the floor—or deck. Except he didn’t feel the sway of waves he would expect on a ship, even one nestled in a dock someplace.

  A faint rustle came from the other side of the room, and he shifted and pushed into a sitting position so he could see past the table. The largest hawk he had ever seen perched on the back of a chair, preening under one huge wing with its beak. The thing was three or four feet in height. At least. He was surprised it did not tip over the chair with its weight.

  More alarming, he hadn’t sensed it with his magic. And he didn’t sense it now. Could this be some illusion?

  His senses were weak compared to Sardelle’s and even Tylie’s, but he was sure he should have detected another being in the room with him, even a feathered hawk being.

  The bird lifted its head and stared at him with beady eyes. It was positioned between him and what appeared to be the only exit, a metal hatch with a wheel for a latch. A coincidence? Or a deliberate positioning?

  As his brain slowly kicked into gear, Tolemek realized he could be looking at something he’d only heard about before: a shaman’s familiar.

  Neither Cofah nor Iskandian sorcerers typically had them or had had them historically speaking. He remembered Sardelle speaking of a shaman she’d battled who’d had a giant owl familiar. At the time, the shaman had been working with the Cofah, but hadn’t been Cofah. Dakrovian? Tolemek couldn’t remember if she had said. That might have been the language he’d heard those people using in his lab. He knew a smattering of Trade Dakrovian, but there were dozens of languages on the continent, and he seemed to recall that a different trade tongue was used at the southern end.

  The door creaked open. No, the hatch. This was definitely a ship.

  A man in buckskin clothing, or something similar, stepped inside, ducking his head for the low hatchway. Fringes and feathers dangled from his tunic, and he wore moccasins with intricate beadwork on the tops, but from the neck up, he looked like some nobleman out of the Iskandian capital in a brown bowler hat and spectacles, with a perfectly waxed mustache, the ends groomed into tips that curled up. Tolemek would have no trouble describing the man—his kidnapper?—to the police, should he get the chance.

  The police wouldn’t find you here, my friend, the man spoke telepathically into his mind.

  “I guess that answers my question about whose familiar that is,” Tolemek croaked, his throat feeling like it was lined with sandpaper. Maybe telepathy would be easier. Except that he was ill-practiced at it and might embarrass himself.

  Realizing the man had read his thoughts, Tolemek attempted to erect a mental barrier around his mind, something Sardelle had been showing him how to do. Unfortunately, he’d been so busy with his chemistry work that he hadn’t had time to come by for many lessons.

  “Yendray is my name,” the man said in Cofah, sliding into the chair, not caring that the giant hawk was still on the back and loomed over his head. The hawk didn’t seem to care either. Tolemek sensed something magical about the man, an item in one of his pockets, perhaps. Some artifact? “I’m sure you’re not pleased to meet me, given the situation, but I am pleased to meet you, Mr. Targoson.” He had a pleasant, lilting accent, and he tipped his hat along with his introduction. “I’ve followed your work.”

  “Ah,” Tolemek said neutrally. “I don’t suppose it’s my healing formulas that have you excited.”

  He didn’t want to spend time with anyone who’d been inspired by the deadly substances he’d made over the years.

  “I’m sure they’re useful, and I wouldn’t mind purchasing the recipe from you, but I confess that it’s your formulas with wartime applications that would be of ultimate use to me.”

  “In doing what?”

  “Uniting my homeland and turning it into a world power that can compete with the likes of Cofahre and Iskandia.”

  “Your homeland being Dakrovia?”

  “Jlongar Jalak, yes. My older brother is the chief there, as our father was before him. My family has brought stability to our little area and united the three contentious tribes in the south around it, but you must admit that our continent as a whole is not taken seriously by the world. Even if it’s no longer as trendy for the empire to kidna
p people and turn them into slaves as it was in centuries past, we’re still exploited for our crops and other resources.”

  “Kidnapping is tedious,” Tolemek said.

  “Have no fear. I do not intend to make you a slave.”

  “Very comforting. Do you intend to release me from my shackles?” The chains clinked as Tolemek lifted his hands a few inches.

  “I have considered it, but you do have a reputation to consider, Mr. Targoson. Deathmaker.” Yendray tipped his hat again, then, seeming to notice some speck of dirt on it, removed it and brushed at it with his fingers. “Even though my men searched you thoroughly, I fear you could cleverly devise a way to escape if your hands were free. To be honest, I thought it would be harder than it was to capture you, especially since apprehending you was our backup plan, only to be employed if we ran into you in your laboratory. We’d hoped to get in and out without encountering you, but as it turns out, it was fortuitous that you were still at work for the day. Since we did not find nearly enough of what we sought.”

  Tolemek did not know what to make of his chatty and even personable kidnapper. Was he the man in charge? It sounded like he might be. How many people did he command? Just the ones that had broken into Tolemek’s lab? Or a whole Dakrovian strike team?

  “And what is it that you sought?” Tolemek asked.

  “You do not sense it on me?” Yendray reached for his pocket.

  Before he pulled it out, Tolemek realized what the man reached for. Not an artifact, but something far more familiar. He should have recognized it immediately.

  Yendray withdrew a stoppered vial, one Tolemek knew to be one of his own. The dark red liquid inside filled it only a third of the way full.

  “You came for the dragon blood?” he asked.

  “Indeed. I heard from a Cofah acquaintance that you and a team of Iskandians stole a significant amount from the empire this past autumn. Excuse me, that would have been spring in your hemisphere. That same acquaintance, one of the scientists who was working for the emperor on weapons using the blood, had to flee Cofahre after he and his team were blamed for the utter destruction of a secret laboratory within a manmade volcano.”

  “Unfortunate,” Tolemek murmured when the man paused. Perhaps a prompt here and there would keep Yendray speaking. He definitely had a chatty streak. It was almost as if Yendray considered him a colleague rather than a kidnapped enemy chained to the deck.

  “He’s working in Jlongar Jalak with me now. We’re remaking some of the imperial tools and weapons, and I’m contributing some of my own ideas, naturally. One does hate to be derivative. But—” he spread a palm toward the ceiling, “—we have a problem.”

  “No dragon blood?”

  “No dragon blood. My colleague smuggled a small amount out of the empire when he left. Less than this.” Yendray wiggled the vial. “We’ve already used it in our experiments. We need much more for what we wish to create.”

  “Such as super weapons?” Tolemek hardly thought it would take more than an organized militia and modern rifles for someone to unite the tribes of Dakrovia. If the books and newspapers could be believed, most of them lived deep in the jungles and ran around in loincloths while waving spears.

  “In order to create quasi-intelligent weapons powered by magic and the most efficient fuel known to man.” Yendray wiggled the vial. “As I’m sure you know, the Cofah were powering rockets and craft akin to the Iskandian fliers with it.”

  Tolemek thought about pointing out that the light sources taken from Galmok Mountain were actually more efficient energy sources, since they didn’t ever seem to run out of power. But he didn’t want to give this man any ideas about something else to steal. It was possible that mages of this era could not replicate the Referatu light sources. Sardelle had said she might be able to figure out how to make them, but as far as Tolemek knew, she hadn’t managed it yet, and the Iskandians were still mining the centuries-old artifacts out of Galmok.

  The hawk, apparently bored by the conversation, went back to preening under its wing. It almost knocked Yendray’s bowler off, but he straightened it without glancing back.

  “The question is,” Yendray said, holding Tolemek’s gaze, “where can we find the rest of the dragon blood you took from Cofahre? I understand that backpacks full of vials were taken.”

  “What was in my lab is all that’s left,” Tolemek said, not looking away from Yendray’s gaze in the hope that he would believe the lie.

  “Come now, Targoson. I’m sure you haven’t used it all in your experiments since then. A little goes a long way, as you have no doubt discovered.”

  Tolemek did his best to shrug, which wasn’t easy with his wrists chained to his ankles. “If there’s more, I don’t know where it is. I was given a couple of vials to work with at the beginning of the summer, and that’s all I’ve seen lately.”

  He knew very well where the rest of the vials were. In a vault in one of the basements in the king’s castle. But he did his best not to think about that and to keep a mental wall around his thoughts.

  Yendray narrowed his eyes, staring directly into Tolemek’s.

  Tolemek felt something brushing at his mind, almost like someone with a rake trying to scrape away leaves to reveal the grassy yard beneath.

  “I see I should have tried to get that information before you started guarding your thoughts,” Yendray said, leaning back in the chair.

  The hawk squawked a protest when the hat bumped its feathered chest. It flexed its wings and flapped them for balance.

  “Apologies, Brukko,” Yendray murmured.

  The hawk quieted and found its balance again. It glared at Tolemek, as if he were to blame for the upset.

  “There’s not any more dragon blood in Iskandia,” Tolemek said.

  Had Yendray come to him in peace, as a fellow colleague interested in science, Tolemek might have been willing to share a vial or two, especially if it was clear the Dakrovian weapons wouldn’t be used against Iskandia or Cofahre. Uniting the tribes there might actually make sense, since they always seemed to be at war. But since the shaman had kidnapped him and was trying to strong-arm him into giving away the location of all the vials, Tolemek was disinclined to help.

  Further, it seemed unlikely that Yendray could get into the castle to steal them without hurting—or killing—people along the way. Even though Tolemek wasn’t a native and hadn’t sworn an oath to defend Iskandia, like Cas had, he found himself inclined to protect the people he’d come to know and care about, and maybe the country as well. King Angulus had been a lot more accommodating to him than Emperor Salatak ever had been, and he even liked the man. Tolemek would hate to see him get hurt because he inadvertently blabbed the location of the vials.

  He would also hate for Angulus to think he’d colluded with the Dakrovians or perhaps been bribed by them. The Iskandian king seemed a fair and reasonable man, but if he was led to the wrong conclusion, he could take away Tolemek’s place in his country with a wave of his hand. He grimaced at the thought of losing his home there with Cas.

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to go find a dragon willing to share some with you,” Tolemek said firmly—Yendray was still watching him through slitted eyes. “And if you could return me to my lab, or at least a dock somewhere in Iskandia before you leave to hunt for it, I would appreciate it.”

  “I’m sure you would.” Yendray stroked one side of his mustache. “I could argue that you have dragon allies and could far more easily obtain more blood than I.”

  “They haven’t shown any interest in sharing their blood with us. In fact, Phelistoth was quite irritated when he recovered from his illness and learned that he’d been used so. Perhaps if you were to take some pastries to the gold dragon, Bhrava Saruth, he would trade some of his blood to you.”

  “That seems unlikely.”

  “It depends on how good the pastries are, how heavily frosted. And if you also offer belly rubs.”

  Yendray snorted. “Yes, I’m positive a dr
agon wants a human rubbing its scales. That sounds like a good way to get oneself bathed in fire and eaten.”

  Clearly, the man had never met Bhrava Saruth.

  “I was hoping it would be easy to get information out of you,” Yendray said, “but I’m not surprised it is not. Fortunately, I came prepared. I have a truth serum that I can use on you. It’s possible since you are a shaman of sorts yourself that you may be able to resist it, but I doubt it.”

  As he rose to his feet, someone outside knocked on the hatch.

  Yendray walked over, opened it, and leaned out. He asked a question in his own language, and a woman responded. Tolemek couldn’t understand any of the words. It definitely wasn’t Trade Dakrovian.

  Yendray nodded and looked at him again. “I’m afraid our truth-telling session will have to wait a little while. It seems you have friends who are searching for you. Have no fear. I’ll see you again shortly. Brukko, keep an eye on him.”

  For the first time, the hawk squawked. It sounded like a complaint. Or a sarcastic comment about how he’d already been doing that.

  “So mouthy for a familiar,” Yendray said, smiling.

  He tipped his hat toward Tolemek and the bird, then ducked and stepped through the hatchway.

  Tolemek tried to see into the dim corridor outside to get a better feel for what kind of ship this was, but all he glimpsed was more gray metal before the hatch clanged shut again.

  He sighed and looked up at the bird, wondering what the odds were of outsmarting it and finding a way out of his shackles before Yendray returned.

  Cas dismounted from her horse in front of the house she’d grown up in, the manicured lawn of the sprawling estate mostly dark, though the driveway to the portico was well-lit. Surprisingly well lit. She eyed what had once been gas lamps and realized her father must have found a way to get electricity out here. She’d heard lines were being run throughout the city, but mostly for the government’s use so far. The army fort had gotten access earlier in the summer, and there was supposed to be a big ceremony at the castle later in the week to showcase the installation of electrical lights there.