“How do you know I won’t hand you over to Grald?” asked Ven, trying unsuccessfully to free his hand from the girl’s grasp. He still was not certain this was Draconas.
“Because you helped Marcus escape,” the child replied calmly. “He did escape safely, by the way. He and the young woman. They’re on their way back to his kingdom by now.”
The child cocked her bright eye at him. “Aren’t yon pleased?”
Ven shrugged. To his surprise, he was pleased. He didn’t plan on showing it, however.
“Good for them,” was all he said.
“You don’t care what happens to your brother? Or to Evelina?”
“Not particularly,” Ven replied. “I treated her badly and I made amends. My brother took her safely away from here. That’s all that matters.”
“So that is why you lured him here.” Draconas nodded in understanding. “To rescue the young woman. You never planned to betray Marcus to Grald, did you?”
“No,” said Ven shortly. “He’s my brother.”
“A brother you never knew you had.”
“I knew,” said Ven, remembering the small hand that had reached out to him when he was a boy, alone and crying in a cave.
Draconas was silent. Ven could almost see him rearranging impressions in his mind.
“Why didn’t you take the young woman away yourself?” Draconas asked. “Why don’t you leave now? You can see through the illusion. You know where to find the gate in the wall.”
Ven continued walking. The girl trotted along at his side. She was forced to take two and half steps for his one, to match his long strides. They’d left the watchful monks far behind. Ven could not see any others, though he had no doubt they were there, keeping an eye on him. Now was the time to reveal his plan and ask for aid. The words stuck in his craw.
Fortunately, Draconas was able to answer his own question.
“Your name,” said Draconas. “Vengeance. That’s the reason you stay. You’re here to kill Grald. Avenge your mother. Or maybe, that’s not quite right.” The girl cast him a bright, sharp glance. “Maybe you’re here to avenge yourself. Take out your wrath on the father who made you what you are.”
“What do you want with me, Draconas?” Ven demanded. “Are you going to lecture me on the folly of trying to slay the dragon by myself? If so, don’t waste your breath. You’re not telling me anything I don’t already know.”
“I’m here because you wanted to talk to me,” Draconas told him pertly.
“I never—”
“Oh, not in words or even in colors,” Draconas assured him. “Good thing, too, for if Grald discovered your plan, he would have your entrails for lunch. We don’t have much time and there’s something you need to see.”
Ven drew in a deep breath, let it out. “Look, Draconas—”
“Draca,” the girl corrected. “Don’t say or even think my name if you can help it.”
“Look, Dracon—Draca, I don’t want to see anything or hear anything except what you can tell me that will help me kill the dragon.”
“To help you kill the dragon? You need your brother.”
Ven snorted.
“I’m serious,” said Draconas. “The sons of Melisande—both the sons of Melisande—should come together to avenge their mother.”
“That’s not going to happen,” Ven said, adding with a burst of impatience, “Just tell me what I need to know, damn it, then you can leave. That’s why you’ve been hanging around here, isn’t it? Nursemaiding me! Like those idiot monks! Well, you don’t have to anymore. I can take care of myself.”
“You have a strange way of asking for help, Dragon’s Son,” Draconas said.
“Don’t call me that,” said Ven.
“What? Dragon’s Son? You are, you know.”
Ven was silent.
“You can’t keep denying it forever,” Draconas said quietly. “You can kill your father, but you can’t kill the truth.”
He paused, then said, “I’ll make you a deal, Ven. I will give you what help I can, which isn’t much. There’s no time to teach you how to use the magic, and that is what you truly need to fight Grald. Nevertheless, I will do what I can to aid you. In exchange for my help, you must agree to come with me.”
“Come with you where?”
“To the palace of Grald. It’s going to be a bit of a climb to reach the entrance. Are you strong enough?”
“Palace? His lair, you mean.” Ven was suddenly eager. “Yes, I’m well enough. Is Grald there? Perhaps you and I together—”
The child shook her head. “I would like very much to have it out with Grald, but I have to forgo that particular pleasure. He is strong and powerful, and he might get lucky and kill me. And though it may be egotistical of me to say this, I can’t afford to die right now. Events have been set in motion that must be stopped, and I’m the only one in a position to do that. Besides, Grald is not in his ‘palace.’ I made certain of that before I came looking for you.”
“Just tell me what’s going on, will you?” Ven said, frustrated. He jerked his hand free of the child’s. “I don’t like all this goose chase, run about.”
“I can’t simply tell you,” Draca said with somber gravity. “You have to see for yourself, Ven. Otherwise, you would not believe me.”
16
ON LEAVING THE MOUNTAIN FASTNESS, DRACONAS HAD SEARCHED for an easier way into the dragon’s lair than the one he’d used last night. Ven’s strong, scaled legs and clawed feet made him an excellent climber, but the Dragon’s Son could not scale sheer rock walls. Draconas had not remained in the palace long last night. He’d seen what he’d come to see, plus much more, and there was no use risking discovery by hanging about. He’d followed a different route out of the dragon’s lair, and that led him to the discovery of a back door about a half-mile lower than the one into which he’d flown. The climb was still arduous. Both Ven and the child, Draca—with her lithe and agile body and her dragon’s strength—managed it easily.
Ven actually enjoyed the climb. The strenuous physical exertion took his mind off his troubles. He had to concentrate on where to put his feet and hands; he had to think about what he was doing. He had no fear of high places—his dragon-blood took care of that. He reveled in the idea that he was rising far above the world with its stink and its staring eyes and cruel laughter. When he and Draconas entered the cave that was Grald’s back door, they entered the calm darkness and silent emptiness of Ven’s childhood—those times he was able to slip away from Bellona and his traplines and his chores and hide himself in his own lair.
“This feels like home,” he said without thinking.
“So it would to one who has dragon-blood in him,” Draconas responded.
The blood burned beneath the surface of Ven’s skin. He had not meant to share his inner thought aloud. He’d spoken his heart, however, and he could not very well unsay it.
“Which way do we go to see this sight of yours?” he demanded, regarding with a grim frown two tunnels that led from the main chamber deeper into the dragon’s lair.
The child motioned with her hand toward a tunnel that slanted off to the left. She put her finger to her lips, cautioning silence, and walked into the shadows, her human feet padding softly. Ven followed, his claws making scraping sounds on the rock.
They advanced deeper into the massive cave, always rising. This tunnel wound round and round in a broad spiral, sometimes leveling out for a short distance, then spiraling around again, still slanting upward. The darkness was complete. Ven’s dragon-sight could scarcely penetrate it. He had the dragon’s instinct for moving in dark places beneath the earth, however, and he followed Draconas with relative ease.
The darkness grew lighter, as if sunlight had found its way below ground. He smelled fresh air and other smells that were distinctly human, some good and some bad, and he was reminded forcibly of the city they had just left. Sounds reached Ven’s ears— sounds of a great many feet moving in unison, with rhythmic march
and stamp; sounds of shouted orders and unified responses.
The sounds were loudest and the smells strongest at a four-way intersection of tunnels that formed a crossroads. Here Draconas halted and raised his hand.
“Wait,” he whispered and he peered down the tunnel that smelled strongly of men. “Good,” he added, after a moment. “No one’s around. We can cross.”
The child darted across the intersection and into the other tunnel. Ven did the same, then he looked back, puzzled.
“It sounds like there’s an army down here.” No need for silence. The noise of the stamping and shouting echoed throughout the corridors.
“There is,” said Draconas.
“Impossible.” Ven was scoffing, dismissive. “This is another dragon illusion.”
“I wish it were,” said Draconas. “Unfortunately, it’s all too real. Take a look.”
They had reached the same tunnel Draconas had walked the night before, coming upon it from a different angle. Motioning Ven to accompany him, Draconas led him to the ledge that overlooked the vast chamber. Ven gazed down in astonishment.
Far below, drawn up in row upon shining row, was an army of humans. Except that this army was like no human army Ven had ever seen. Sunlight, filtering down through shafts carved into the cavern walls, gleamed on armor that had a strange and beautiful iridescent quality. At first, Ven took the armor for some sort of chain mail. The soldiers moved in the armor with far more ease than soldiers could move in chain mail, however, no matter how expensive or finely made. The mail coats that covered them from head to toe seemed to weigh almost nothing, for the soldiers wheeled and shifted and lunged with as much ease as if they were wearing homespun wool cloth. Ven looked from the armor down at his own scale-covered legs, and he thought he understood.
“You have judged right,” Draconas said, seeing the direction of his gaze. “The armor these soldiers wear is made of dragon scales. It is lightweight and strong—so strong that I doubt if any weapon forged by human hands can penetrate it. Such armor will turn the sharpest sword.”
Ven watched the soldiers drill, watched them wheel and turn in unison, and he was puzzled.
“What sort of weapons are they using? And why do they fight in pairs?”
“That is the genius of it. Think of what you know of the dragon-magic—”
“Not much,” Ven muttered.
“They fight in pairs because each pair is made up of one male, one female. Fully half the army is composed of female warriors. Not like Bellona. These women do not fight with weapons. They fight with magic. Like the holy sisters of Seth, these women use the magic to defend themselves and their partners. The men use the magic to fight. In other words, the women are the shield, the men are the sword. The weapons they are using are darts. They do not look very lethal, but they can be thrown by the hand with the force of the magic behind it. One of those darts killed Bellona.
“The man throws the dart from behind the cover of the defensive magic cast by the woman beside him. Both of them remain invulnerable to attack. And the dart is not their only weapon, I’ll wager.”
“But the magic drives males insane—like the mad monks. Those men don’t look mad,” Ven remarked.
“No, they’re quite sane,” said Draconas. “Like your brother, Marcus. I thought I had done something special with him. Apparently I was wrong. Over the years, Grald culled out the lunatics and placed them in the brotherhood of the Blessed. Not a bad plan. The Blessed keep watch over the population of Dragonkeep, and if the ordinary people know that they are crazed and unpredictable, they fear them all the more. Grald put the sane males into his army. He’s had hundreds of years of selective breeding, and he was able to pick and choose and train only the best. This may be the second or third generation of soldiers we’re looking at.”
Draconas paused, then said quietly, “No human army has a chance against them.”
Ven glanced at the girl sharply. “Human army. What human army do you mean?”
“These soldiers are preparing to march to war. The dragons are going to use them to launch an attack against Idylswylde.”
Below them, the male warriors threw darts, while the woman chanted and sang, making circular motions with their hands, as though smoothing out the empty space in front of them. The magic of the women shaped the air into concentric circles, so the bodies behind it became shapeless blurs of purple and blue radiance, dazzling and ghastly.
Other soldiers, ranged at intervals around the pairs, played at being the enemy. They fired arrows—real arrows, not illusion— into their ranks. Other soldiers drew swords and ran in to attack on foot.
The arrows struck the dazzling, whirling, magical shields and bounced off. Swords hit the shields and were either turned aside or the blades shattered in the hands of those who wielded them. The leader called a halt to the exercise and congratulated his troops and dismissed them.
“For,” said their leader, his voice ringing through the chamber, “the days of conquest are near at hand. The day we have worked for our entire lives will shortly be upon us.”
“When do we march?” someone cried out.
“Soon,” was the answer.
The troops dispersed, laughing and talking.
The child looked very grim.
“What are you going to do?” Ven asked. “Warn Marcus? Go fight alongside him?”
“It’s not that simple,” said Draconas, and the child’s eyes were dark and troubled. He glanced at Ven. “For me or for you, Dragon’s Son.”
Draconas rose to his feet. “Come with me. There’s something else you need to see.”
They wended their way back down through the tunnels. Ven found that he had a sense of where he was and that he could choose which branching corridor to take nine times out of ten. He liked being here. He could walk tall and straight in these dark corridors. He liked the feeling of isolation, the comfort of the silence. He thought he would like to remain here, maybe forever.
They did not leave the cavern, as Ven half expected them to do. Draca took him on a new route, one that led deeper into the mountain’s heart, deeper underground. Now the silence was heavy with the weight of the mountain pressing down upon them. Ven added these new corridors to his mental map, and it was like a corkscrew, spiraling ever downward.
They were far from civilization. Far from the world. So far that, when Ven heard the sound of human voices, he was severely disappointed.
“Hush!” The child caught hold of his hand and squeezed it. Her words were little more than a disturbance of the still air. “We are close.”
The child tugged him gently forward down a tunnel that grew lighter with every footfall. The voices were clearer now; Ven could distinguish words, and they were obviously human.
“What is all this?” he asked, mouthing the words.
The child shook her head and urged him on.
The light was quite bright now. It was not the light of sun. This light had a pure, white quality to it that Ven recognized.
The white light was his light, the light of the emptiness that hid him from the dragon.
The voices were only a few feet away. The child stopped and looked up at him. He could see her quite clearly. He could see the child and, in the stark, white light, he could see the shadow of the red-gold dragon standing behind the child, wings spread protectively.
“Go on ahead,” said Draconas. He paused, then added, regarding Ven intensely, “If you want to make yourself known, that is up to you. Grald will almost certainly be informed that you were here, and I have no idea how he will react. You might be putting yourself in danger. The choice is yours . . . Dragon’s Son.”
Ven glowered, not liking the reference. He did not like all this skulking about and mystery, either. He wanted to ask questions, but he felt that to do so would be to play into Draconas’s game, of which Ven was growing weary. He would not give the dragon the satisfaction. He’d go see whatever this was he was supposed to see and then maybe they could discuss kil
ling Grald.
With a final, grim glance, Ven turned and left the child standing in the tunnel. He glided forward, as quietly as his scraping claws would permit, to the tunnel’s entrance.
He looked into a brightly lit chamber, a largish chamber, in which about twenty people had gathered to hear another person speak. Here was the source of the human voices.
But Ven had been mistaken. The voices were not human. Not entirely.
Here were humans who had dragon legs, like himself. Here were humans who had human legs and dragon wings and dragon-scaled arms ending in clawed hands. There were males and females. Some were more dragon than others. One young female—the speaker—had a human head and breasts. The rest of her body was that of a dragon, though molded in a softer, human form. Delicate wings hung from her shoulders. A little boy standing beside her was almost completely human, except for a glittering scaled tail that twitched and thumped the ground as he listened.
The conversation was lively. The other half-dragons were not at all shy about questioning or challenging the speaker, who gave back as good as she got. Ven listened to them talk, but he had no sense of what they were discussing. He was too shaken.
He sensed more, then saw the child, Draca, come up to stand beside him.
“They are the dragon’s sons,” said Draconas softly. “And the dragon’s daughters.”
Ven was mute, struck dumb. He stood motionless, paralyzed by shock. He could only stare, his heart and his gut twisting together so that one was wrung and the other was wrenched.
“They are your siblings, Ven,” Draconas continued. “Your younger brothers and sisters.”
“They are monsters,” Ven stated harshly. He felt his gorge rising. “Monsters like me. No wonder they keep them hidden down here!”
The dragon’s children had their own, exceptional hearing. Though Ven had spoken in a whisper, they all heard and they all turned to stare.
“A spy!” hissed one.
“Wait!” called out the young woman. “Wait!” she called again, and this time she was speaking to Ven. “Do not run off. Didn’t you hear us? We were talking about you.”
Master of Dragons Page 13
