by Paul Collins
Above all, she needed a friend. And the only person she could think of was Marla.
So be it. Taking a deep breath, she turned and angled back towards the Wardragon’s fortress, bending her path southwards. During the flight from Tow’s castle, she had mentally mapped the route, never taking her eyes off the terrain below. Then she spotted a wide river. It led – after a somewhat meandering journey – to the cliff wall along which the centaurs had trailed her.
By the time she reached a point some two miles south of the fortress, the cloud mass had thickened and a false twilight had fallen; sustained heat lightning flickered within the clouds, giving them a lurid, bruised look. She stopped where the jungle thinned and surveyed the terrain ahead: here the land entered a swampy region that bordered, she guessed, the headwaters of the river. To the east, volcanoes belched smoke and lava, and lit the underbelly of the clouds. The smell of sulphur was stifling.
Jelindel set off south, using the glow from the volcanoes to navigate. She walked thus for two hours, till her legs felt like lead and her head spun with weariness.
She only realised how inattentive she had become, when she was ankle deep in a muddy pool. Almost at once she began to sink. Quicksand, she thought wildly. She lurched backwards quickly, but her feet were snared. She stumbled, arms windmilling, and fell. The moment she hit the water she felt something close on her left foot, holding her tightly. The pool began to bubble and froth: something was rising from the depths.
Panicking, Jelindel scrabbled in the murky water for some purchase, a log, a tree root, anything. But her grasping hands found nothing. Then a dark shadow heaved itself from the quagmire and towered over her. She saw two red eyes, glowing like coals. She hurled a spell of binding at the creature, and this checked it for a moment. Its grip on her ankle loosened.
Jelindel twisted free and tried to dog paddle to safety. Then the hand was back, gripping her whole leg. In an eye-blink, it had dragged her beneath the surface.
Jelindel lashed out with her fists and her free leg, kicking and punching. It was next to impossible to use magic while submerged, and she quickly felt herself weakening. Her lungs wanted to burst. Darkness closed in on her, and her last thought was of Daretor, and how hurt he would be.
For a moment, Jelindel thought that she had woken in Black Quell’s domain. Something was thumping her chest, and a hard leathery tube was in her mouth, tasting of old sweat. It pinned her tongue painfully against her lower teeth as air snorted into her lungs. Nearby she heard the sound of a bellows. She coughed and spluttered and all the pounding and blowing stopped and the leathery tube was snatched from her mouth.
She sat up coughing, and spewing pond water. Someone clapped, and others joined in.
‘Here,’ said a familiar voice. A damp rag cleared away caked-on mud from Jelindel’s eyes. When she could see clearly, she realised that Taggar was standing before her, a worried smile on his face. He was surrounded by a group of people. Tow was one of them, Marla another.
Jelindel leapt to her feet, swung back her arm, and punched Taggar. He sprawled to the ground, blinking in surprise.
‘Traitor!’ she shouted, shaking the numbness from her knuckles.
Tow helped Taggar to his feet.
Taggar worked his jaw. ‘One forgets the mage-born sometimes use forces other than magic,’ he said ruefully. ‘It’s not often I’m taken by surprise.’
Jelindel leant forward, keeping on the balls of her feet, ready and belligerent. She expected Taggar to attack her any second now. ‘And it’s not often I judge wrong,’ she snapped back.
Taggar regarded her, making no move to attack. Indeed, he continued to grin. Then, puzzlingly, he bowed to her.
‘What’s this? Another trick?’
‘No trick,’ said Taggar. ‘Just an apology. There was no time to warn you of the trap Kaleton had set, without giving myself away.’
Jelindel felt sudden doubt.
‘I thought it tactically wiser to keep one hand free,’ said Taggar simply.
Jelindel harrumphed, and relaxed her fists slowly. With a start she realised that most of the others, including Marla, were smiling good-humouredly. ‘It was you who helped me get away?’
Taggar bowed again, but also frowned a little. ‘I appealed to the greedier side of a certain sergeant of the guards, one named Bogon. But as for the rest of your escape, I confess I had little hope for it. The Wardragon has the Fortress extensively wired with farsights. The ease of your escape is therefore puzzling. You are not bugged however.’
‘Bugged?’
Taggar ignored her query, then relented. ‘A cold science way of tracking people.’
‘You know a lot about cold science,’ said Jelindel.
‘A – professional – interest, you might say.’
Jelindel glanced over at the mud pool. It was dead flat, as though stagnant. ‘You got here just in time.’
‘Yes and no.’
‘Taggar, you make a religion of being cryptic! What does “Yes and no” mean?’
‘It means we got here too late to save you. When we pulled you from the mud and dispatched the creature who lives there, you were dead. There was no breath in your body, and no pulse.’
Jelindel’s eyes widened. She glanced at Marla who nodded, but the girl appeared as puzzled as Jelindel.
‘Can cold science bring dead people back to life?’
‘It’s called resuscitation,’ Taggar explained. ‘Cold science has little to do with it. If you are caught within a few minutes of drowning, it usually works.’
Jelindel said dryly, ‘Usually?’
Taggar laughed. ‘We’d best make a move.’
An hour later, they were some two hundred feet above the jungle floor. Tow’s gang had built a series of connecting thatch tree houses as a precaution against being caught outside after dusk on the ground. Strange things happened then; nightmares took on form, and those who saw them too closely were themselves rarely seen again.
After a quick change of clothes, Jelindel was alone with Taggar. She plucked a piece of fruit from a bowl and bit into it. ‘Tell me something, if you will. Who are you, Taggar? Why are you here, truly?’
Taggar said, ‘Where is here?’
Jelindel snorted. ‘Now I get it,’ she said. ‘You’re some kind of mystic. Such people always answer questions with more questions.’
‘A regrettable habit. But the answer to your question is rather long.’
‘It seems we have all night,’ Jelindel said, licking the fruit’s juice from her fingers.
Taggar drew his knees up to his chest and looked up at the dark clouds, glimpsed through the forest canopy. He looked, for a moment, both old and sad. ‘This story begins more than five thousand years ago. Up there, in the void between worlds. It’s cold, and there is no air. People fly through from world to world in ships that carry their own air.’
‘I’ve seen one,’ Jelindel said. ‘A dragon craft.’ Taggar frowned. ‘Truly?’
‘It belonged to a being called Korok, but that too is a long story. I doubt the craft was his, but he was in control of it.’
‘Korok.’ Taggar nodded. ‘You knew him?’
‘A – mercenary, of sorts. Do you know what became of him?’
‘I blew him and his dragon ship into a million pieces near a town called Landretal,’ Jelindel said. ‘He left me little choice. Was the dragon craft his?’
‘He and others mutinied and commandeered it.’ Taggar fell silent, as if lost in the long corridors of memory.
Jelindel waited. Finally she prompted, gently: ‘Five thousand years ago, you said …’
Taggar stirred. ‘What’s that?’
‘It all began five thousand years ago.’
The off-worlder smiled. His eyes had taken on their natural cat-like appearance. Jelindel found them intriguing and stared into them. Taggar began: ‘Five thousand years ago there was no access to the paraworlds. There was no magic – not as you now know it …’
Jel
indel blinked. ‘No magic?’ She remembered Cimone’s words: ‘Your fate is to save magic, or destroy it. The future lies on a knife’s edge …’ Was the future the same as the past then?
Taggar held up a hand, smiling. ‘Patience,’ he said. ‘I shall explain all.’
Jelindel stifled the riot of feelings in her chest, taking a deep calming breath. ‘I’m listening,’ she said.
‘As I said, there was no magic, save for what the dragons knew, which is the oldest and first magic. For all the long history of our species, for we are all descended from just one world, lost now in the mists of time – it was the only magic.’ He let this sink in. ‘In those days, Chiron was God-king. A ruthless, long-lived tyrant, he ruled all the known worlds, thousands of them, using cold science to maintain his brutal tyranny. His dynasty had ruled for ten times ten thousand years, and all people, high and low alike, were without hope. For nothing could oppose him. Nothing could stop him. Except one thing. One thing only …’
‘Magic,’ breathed Jelindel.
Taggar nodded. ‘Dragon magic. The dragons had kept to themselves on Q’zar, that strangest of worlds that had given birth to them, for even longer than the dominion of the God-kings. They cared not for the affairs of humanity. But one day Chiron heard of them. He sent a force against Q’zar and they nearly killed a very young dragon, leaving him for dead, and blind in one eye.’
‘The Sacred One,’ Jelindel mouthed.
‘The dragons rose against the Chironian fleet, even those in orbit above, floating in the void, and destroyed all but one small two-man fighter, which escaped to tell the tale. Chiron was livid. He did not believe that anything or anyone could oppose him. But the forces of cold science were no match for dragon magic and few of their weapons harmed the dragons themselves. And so he did what all tyrants do. He threw an even larger, deadlier force against them, and they destroyed this too. Some say he went mad then, while others say he was always mad. In any case, he ordered that all life on Q’zar be destroyed, that the planet be wiped clean. A hundred thousand Q’zarans had died by the time an envoy was sent to the dragons and pleaded for help. And the dragons agreed. They did battle with Chiron’s forces once more but they did something else, too, something which changed the universe forever …’
Jelindel was leaning forward in her chair. ‘What? What did they do?’
Taggar fixed her with a look. ‘At the dawn of time, they say one of the Odd Gods who rebelled against the others, stole fire and gave it to humankind. This time it was the dragons, and it was magic they gave to humans. Magic, and the lore by which they could use it.’
Jelindel stared. ‘They taught us how to use magic.’
‘Yes,’ said Taggar, ‘those of you who had the skill. It was not the same as dragon magic, for humans cannot wield that. It is a lesser kind, but powerful nevertheless. And so the Great Rebellion began. The people of Q’zar fought back, defending their world successfully, and magic began to spread from world to world, and as each world took up the ancient art, so it threw off the yoke of tyranny, and Chiron’s dominion gradually diminished. At this time, your people learned of the paraworlds.’
‘You said there were no paraworlds.’
‘There weren’t. It was something even the dragons had not foreseen, for it is a peculiarly human phenomenon. When the use of magic reaches a certain point, paraworlds come into being: each is a shadow and mirror of the sourceworld, in this case Q’zar, so all the paraworlds that you may visit from Q’zar are in some sense altered versions of Q’zar. They cannot be reached by spaceship travelling through the great vacuum that separates the stars. They can only be reached by magic – or by a fusion of magic and cold science.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Jelindel.
‘No one does, for sure,’ said Taggar. ‘My own people believe that everything in this universe is a great dream. We even call it the Dreamverse. We do not know who is doing the dreaming, or why, but magic is also the language of dreams.’
‘But what of Golgora?’ Jelindel prompted. ‘Many worlds send their peoples here, and you said they cannot thus be reached.’
‘I did. Golgora is something different. It is the collective shadow of the paraworlds, even the paraworld manifolds of other “real” planets, like the hub of a wheel with many spokes stretching out in different directions, linked to other manifolds, other “collections” of paraworlds, if you like. Golgora represents the unwanted, repressed and rejected parts of the Collective Mind that dreamed all this. It’s a place of nightmare, where nightmares are born. Like the Farvenu.’
Jelindel started. ‘Slow down, Taggar. The Farvenu came from Golgora?’
‘In a sense. The Farvenu were sent here, rejected creatures which Golgora slowly changed into what they are today: the universe’s daemons.’
‘But that means they escaped.’
‘They developed a form of cold science. No one knows how, but they used it to create a non-magical portal, which of course is the loophole, since Golgora forbids the manifesting of magical ones. In any case, the Farvenu escaped, and afterwards made a religion of cold science, hating magic as fiercely as Chiron had.’
‘That’s why they go from world to world, stealing cold science, hoarding it.’
‘They seek to change the universe back to the way it was, before the dragons interfered, and the “disease” of magic infected most of the known worlds. Before the might of Chiron was broken and the Age of Magic had arrived.’
Jelindel’s head was reeling. Taggar’s words made sense of so many things. ‘What of the Wardragon?’ she asked. ‘Where does it fit in?’
‘I’m coming to that,’ said Taggar. ‘The loyal remnants of Chiron, the vestiges of his once great galactic empire, did not go quietly. They laboured long in secret, plumbing the depths of cold science, looking for a way to hit back at magic, to destroy it – and those who bequeathed it to humanity.’
Jelindel’s eyes went wide.
Taggar nodded. ‘Did you never wonder what the name Wardragon meant?’
Jelindel shook her head.
‘It is a simple contraction of its mission: to war upon the dragons, until they are no more. And by extension, on magic itself.’
Taggar sipped from a cup of water, as if his throat had become dry. ‘The Chironian scientists, as I said, laboured long – and failed. No cold science could stand against the ancient skill of the dragons. But out of failure – and the purges that accompanied it – someone saw the solution.’
Jelindel saw it too. ‘They fused magic and cold science.’
‘And created seven mailshirts – seven Wardragons. The shirt we seek is the first and last of them: the first to be made, when the making was as much guesswork as science, and the last one remaining, as the others have been destroyed, one by one.’
‘By you,’ said Jelindel, seeing the truth suddenly.
‘By me, and my colleagues. We were part of the rebel movement, and we had all but won when the mailshirts came against us. Using cold science and magic made them almost invincible and if the Chironian laboratories had been able to make even seven more of the fiendish things, it would all have been over. As it was, they spent themselves in this last effort to eradicate magic from the universe.’
‘So you’re a kind of – constable?’
‘Something like that,’ said Taggar. ‘I think you’ve guessed that I am of a long-lived race. Being long lived, we were the ideal choice for this hunt, which would take centuries, if not more.’
‘How did you end up here?’
‘Korok and some others sold us out to the Chironians. Korok abandoned my team and me here, in lieu of cutting our throats. Like everyone else, they believed it to be escape-proof. But like the Farvenu, we managed to use cold science to create a portal, and we made it to Q’zar. One of our number was Hawtarnas –’
Jelindel clicked her fingers. ‘The Book of Wars. Did he not write that?’
‘At least five hundred years ago, yes. Hawtarnas was the most lit
erate of our group, although he was long ostracised for divulging the mailshirt’s properties. Now he’s a hermit living in the Garrical Mountains, unwilling to come down or to lend a hand in defeating the Wardragon. As our chief systems engineer, he would have been a boon to our cause – it was he who developed the portal. Alas he is lost to us. But back to my story. The means by which we escaped was flawed. Some died, and some went mad. One, my beloved, was bereft of all memory: Garricka was her name. She could not remember who she was, or anything of our mission. We could not care for her at that time. The Wardragon was about to attack Q’zar, even though the dragons had long ago been betrayed into exile – this was only a thousand years ago. We left Garricka with a farmer and his family. We gave them money to look after her till we returned. I never saw her again.’ A shadow flitted across Taggar’s face.
Jelindel wondered at a pain so old, and thought of Daretor.
‘The farm was situated where Lake Skyfall now sits, where the mailshirt was finally – so we thought – destroyed when the Wardragon’s ship plummeted to earth in a great fireball. Later, before we could leave Q’zar, we heard rumours, and our hearts became heavy again. The Wardragon had not been destroyed, merely broken up. We searched for any sign of it, but only rumours did we hear. Then by chance we came upon a single link.’
‘Eventually we tracked down more and more of the dragonlinks. It took a long time, several life spans of your people. I lost many friends in the interim. Some died by accident, two went mad, missing their home-worlds and families. Some became dispirited. Everywhere we went, we met ignorance. Knowledge of the great war and rebellion, and the dragons’ betrayal, had faded. And this frightened us. A great saying that comes down to my people from the dawn of time is this: “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it”. And this we feared, for we have seen the truth of it many times over.’ He looked sharply at her, and Jelindel felt that his keen gaze pierced her soul. ‘Each of us must remember the past, or we are doomed. Ask the dragons if this is not true.’
