A Bitter Brew

by Greg Curtis

  “It is an old alliance, but we knew they would come.” She lied straight faced to them.

  “But we –.”

  “Thought we should help.” Hendrick cut Marnie off. Then he shook his head almost imperceptibly at her. “Since so many of our people are in your lands it seems like the least we could do. Tell us; is there anything we can do to help? Most of us have warspells, but we have some other spells as well.”

  “No.” Darnial Marn shook her head. “I appreciate the offer and I know you only want to help. But we have matters in hand.”

  Marnie did her best not to gasp when she heard her say that. Did she not notice that she was standing in a huge field filled with thousands upon thousands of bodies? That the city was in ruins? That the sky was on fire? And why was she lying about the dragons? Did she not know the truth?

  “I see,” Hendrick answered her non-committally. “Then we should probably return home.”

  Marnie stared at him, wondering what he was saying. Or if she should say something. After all, things were anything but “in hand”. And then she thought about it and realised he was right. Whatever was happening and however much it seemed like the mist breathers were in charge, there was nothing they could do. This was not their land.

  “That would probably be best.” Darnial Marn dismissed him. And with him she dismissed the rest of them as well.

  After that things went as expected, no matter how bizarre it seemed, and in short order Marnie found herself standing in a barley field with hundreds of other Guild members, wondering what had just happened. Foolishly she asked.

  “I haven't a clue,” Hendrick answered her as he closed the portal. “But I trust that woman no more than I trust any guttersnipe. Not with my valuables, and not with the lives of any of our people. And that includes Sana.”

  “But Sana –.”

  “That woman does not know who called the dragons. But she was sure it wasn't us, which was why she was so happy to claim the glory of such a spell. But my guess is that she will be desperately hunting whoever did, because that is a spell of such power that it defies belief.”

  “And Indle?”

  “May be in trouble I suspect. He's upset her pride by calling for help. But more than that, that woman reminds me strongly of some of the nobles of the Court. She makes me think that the Vordan Empire is as much driven by factions, infighting nobles, back stabbing and treachery as our own Court was. And I don't want to get involved or have our people caught up in it. Especially not when we don't know who the various players are or what their goals might be.”

  “This is their mess. We should stay out of it.”

  “Alright.” Marnie found herself agreeing with that. “But what about our people living in the Empire?”

  “We warn them. Tell them what we know and to keep well away from their nobles. And maybe in time some of them will come home.” He stared evenly at her. “Once Styrion has become a better place for our people.”

  “Now if you don't mind, I should cast a portal spell to take us home.”

  “But we're only a league or two from the Guild. We can walk.”

  “No, we're a long way further than that. Darnial Marn wasn't lying about one thing. That great portal of theirs is a powerful spell. It didn't just reach across the worlds. It also crossed the leagues. We don't grow barley in Burbage. I'd quite like to be able to study that spell one day.”

  With that he turned his attention to his spell and shortly a new portal formed in front of them. One that would take them home. And when she finally stepped through it and saw the barns in front of her, she felt a wave of happiness flow over her such as she had never felt before.

  Then when she saw Tyrollan's happy smile and stepped into his welcoming arms, that feeling only grew.

  Chapter Fifty Two

  Digging holes was no pleasure. Hendrick had decided that some time before. But lifting the huge uprights into those holes, straightening them and then concreting them into place, was even less fun. They were just so heavy. And there were so many of them. And to add to his discomfort Val seemed to be enjoying his suffering.

  “Put some effort into it!” He urged Hendrick on as he dragged the next pole along the ground to its waiting hole.

  “You know, you could help. I could bring you across and instead of yelling at me you could actually do some work!” He could do that now. The more he practised with his spells, the more he learned. And one of the things he had learned was where Val's world was. It was all he needed. Once he had pinpointed a world and a location within it, the rest was easy.

  “And deprive you of the sense of accomplishment you'll feel when you're finally done? I couldn't do that!” The sage laughed at him. “Besides, I'm a sage. We don't labour with our hands. That would be demeaning!”

  “But it's alright for me?”

  “This is your choice. You could have hired some people to do it for you. You didn’t so I presume you felt some sort of need to punish yourself!”

  “Huh!” And yet even as he denied it, Hendrick had to wonder if there might be some truth to his friend's words. He did feel as though he'd failed. Not for losing the battle with the beast's army and needing the dragons to save them. They could never have won that battle. But he had failed to understand what was happening. He still didn't understand. None of it made sense. Not the beast's arrival in Styrion. Not his destruction of the Hold. Not even the war. It all felt like a tale writ by the bards. Something that up until recently would have been a work of pure fiction. But these bards had drunk too much of his ale.

  “So tell me again what you've learned.”

  Best he thought, to set his thoughts to the mystery. And Hendrick had to admit that it was useful having a friend who wasn't just a sage, but who also had access to the ancient archives of the Empire. Hendrick had no such access, and wouldn’t have been welcome if he’d tried. But even if he had been, it would have been pointless as he didn't speak the tongue. Val had to act as his eyes and ears in the Empire.

  Things though were fairly much as he had expected from all he'd heard. The dead were being buried and the injured treated. Callanar was slowly being cleaned up though it would be a long time before the city was rebuilt. People were coming to terms with their losses – and they had been large. The estimate was that more than a million people had been killed and twice as many more had been injured. But they were still finding bodies so those numbers would rise.

  It would take more than the week Darniel Marn had claimed it would, before things returned to how they had been.

  “Nothing new. Eleven Empire worlds were destroyed in the last eight thousand years. Four by wars. Two by plagues. Two by falling into complete anarchy. One by pollution. The fools built so many steam engines and other devices that they poisoned the oceans and the sky. Another world was destroyed as a result of an invasion of otherworldly creatures – giant spiders. And the last by fear – the people simply grew too frightened of anyone and everything else that they hid in their homes and starved to death.”

  “And then I found a further eight worlds that weren't completely destroyed, but which suffered devastating disasters that brought them close to that point. Huge crop failures which led to mass starvation. Civil disobedience that levelled cities. More pollution. And so forth. I don't understand what exactly happened, but they fit the pattern.”

  “A pattern that doesn't agree with what a behemoth would do.” It was the one thing he was sure of. Mostly. What they were facing wasn't a beast of the depths. They just didn't do what this one did. At least according to everything his friend had been able to tell him as he continued his research.

  “It dragged a volcano across from one world to the next.” Val pointed out the obvious problem in his theory. As he had before.

  “I know.” Hendrick dropped the end of the post on the ground by the hole he'd dug. Then he straightened up and stretched his back. Those damned things were heavy. “But it still doesn't make sense.”

  “A behemo
th rolls over in its sleep and volcanoes erupt, tidal waves are created and hurricanes rampage across the land. That however is not what we have seen. Wars, plagues, famines? They're all smaller things that have devastating consequences. Assuming it could even do something like that, why would one of these beasts go to the trouble of creating them? If it wanted to destroy a realm it could do it without resorting to such tactics.”

  “In sooth it has no need of any tactics! It can simply destroy its enemies. You need tactics and strategy when you don't have that sort of power. Or when you have an objective that no amount of strength will let you achieve.”

  Hendrick created a warp beneath the far end of the post and used it to raise it ten feet in the air. High enough that the post slid the last foot or so into the hole. And then he grabbed his hammer and a bronze spike, and started nailing it into the end.

  “No. I think you were right that first day when you called this thing a liar of the depths. Because I think that that is exactly what it is. A liar. I think it's just pretending to be a behemoth.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of what you and the Mythagan and everyone else has said from the start. You can't fight a behemoth. You just try to manage them, which mostly means leaving them in peace and waiting until they go back to sleep. What better defence could you have than for everyone to be so convinced that you're unbeatable that they don't even try?”

  Having decided that the spike was in deep enough, Hendrick put away his hammer and started tying the ends of the thin ropes to it. Once secured, he raised the warp a little higher and kicked the base of the post a little more so that it finally fell all the way into the hole.

  “So let's say you're right,” Val ran with his argument. “The question becomes who? Who else can drag a volcano across from one world to another? Who else can wage a war for nearly ten thousand years?”

  “I don’t know. I’m as lost as you.” With the ropes properly tied, Hendrick started turning the stakes around so that the tension on them was right, and then slowly straightened the post so that it stood perfectly erect. Checking his measurements one by one against the plumb-line he'd set up.

  “But let's say it's not. Let’s say it's a race of people bent on the destruction of the Empire. Able to do what they can because they number in the millions and have either technology or magic or both, beyond anything we know.” It wasn't a good theory. In fact it was a very poor one. But it was the only one he had. “The question then becomes why? What rage consumes them?”

  “You agree with Sana then?”

  “By the gods yes! You don't just wake up one morning and think – ‘I'll go out and slaughter millions of people’. Or ‘I think I'll spend the next eight or ten thousand years of my life working out how to do it’. That speaks of rage. A wrong done to someone that was so terrible that it can never be forgotten or forgiven.”

  He wished Sana was with them so he could ask her. But she had disappeared after the battle, running off with the dragons according to the Mythagan – whatever that meant. And he supposed he couldn't blame her for that. She had after all ended the war and saved millions of lives. But she was still the only one who might be able to tell him the why. And once he had the why he was sure he could work out the who.

  “Eight thousand years is nothing to a behemoth. Eighty thousand years would be nothing.” Val pointed out another flaw in his argument. He was good at that.

  “We know it has something to do with the crystals. Sana said that.”

  “Sana is not in her right mind. And what she knows and doesn't know is unclear,” Val reminded him.

  “But Erohilm said the same. First she spent two centuries wandering the Empire, preaching her faith of giving up magic and the search for power, and settling down to grow crops. Then a century or so later she turns up in Malthas and breaks the minds of a bunch of wizards and persuades them to use the engines and thereby destroy the realm.”

  “But only after her teachings weren't followed,” Val argued. “And despite the fact that she had become revered and her words were heard by millions, no one was rushing off to do as she said.”

  “Her actions are almost those of a rejected child, who finding herself ignored, decided to teach everyone a lesson in the most horrible way possible. She seems to have acted out of spite.”

  “Maybe.” Hendrick had to agree with Val on that. There was something of the vexed and bitter child in what she had done. “But Erohilm did not start this. By the time she arrived the worlds of the Empire had already suffered at least six thousand years of war. So what happened all those years before?”

  Satisfied that the pole was straight, Hendrick walked over to the waiting barrow and started shovelling the sand, cement and shingle into it and then mixing.

  “You still haven't found anything in the archives?”

  “No. I've read everything they have from that time, and there's absolutely nothing that suggests the Empire did anything to anyone in the centuries before the first attack. In fact, according to everything that's written, it was a very peaceful time. The Vordan Empire was growing. There were no wars or disasters of any kind. It was just a steady march of progress in technology and magic. And where they met other races who didn't want to join them, they maintained peaceful relations. There were problems, but mostly it is looked back on as a golden age.”

  “So either they did something and hid it, or they did something wrong without knowing.” Hendrick wheeled the wooden barrow over to the post he'd set in place and started carefully shovelling the mix into the hole, careful not to knock the post as he did so.

  “Maybe. Or maybe not.” Val decided to be contrary again. “What is it that's got you so convinced that it's not a behemoth?”

  “I don't know. But I think it was when I saw the dragons.” Actually he was sure of it. He just didn't know why. But something about them had stirred something in him. “When they came to Sana's summons.”

  “Call,” Val corrected him. “No one summons dragons. They don't even come to each other. But sometimes they come if you call.”

  “They don't even come to each other?” Hendrick was surprised by that.

  “No. They're very solitary creatures. And they're all rivals for the right to mate with the queens. Whatever spell Sana has it must have been powerful to bring them together. The only reasons I know of are when they would come together are to mate, or to protect a child in danger. I think that must have been what her call was.”

  “Queens? As in there are more than one?” Hendrick hadn't realised that. He'd thought there was only Dibella. They called her 'The Queen' after all.

  “Many. But they're even more solitary than their consorts. The males will fight one another for the right to mate with a queen when her season comes. But the rest of the time they're peaceful. The queens however, will battle one another just for being too close to them. Being within a thousand leagues of another queen's territory could result in a fight to the death. And they'll kill any males if they intrude on their territory when it’s not time to mate. They don't travel a lot.”

  “That's a pity. They were magnificent.” More than that, they had been glorious. Majestic. True rulers of the sky.

  “I suspect you wouldn't say that if you had been a ghost dragon!”

  Hendrick laughed. But the idea also made him think. And mostly it made him think that the Mythagan had been right when they'd said that the ghost dragons weren't dragons. Because they weren't. He had seen dragons. And he had seen the ghost dragons, and there simply wasn't any comparison. It wasn't just the size and the power. It was everything. The ghost dragons were like a very poor copy of them. A sculpture done by a blind man who'd never seen a dragon. But trying to explain that to his friend proved impossible.

  “If I'd created something that inferior I would throw it away. Why would you keep it? Better to start again or just give up.”

  “So would I.” Hendrick agreed with his friend. “Keeping it would be a constant reminder of your failure.�
� And yet he thought, that was exactly what the ghost dragons were – failures. And their enemy, Erohilm, had kept them. Maybe she just wasn't any sort of artist.

  He reached for the buckets of water and gently poured them one after another into the hole to start the process of turning the dry mix into concrete.

  “Of course it wouldn't be too good for the ghost dragons.”

  “Val?” Hendrick heard something in his friend's remark that made him look up.

  “It just occurred to me. You're rebuilding your house now for the third time. And each time you repair the damage and make the new one better. But each time you throw away the broken pieces and start again with new ones. This time you've thrown away the whole house. That's good for you. But it isn't any good for your old house. Maybe it's the same with the ghost dragons. Maybe they're broken but still don't want to be thrown away.”

  “You're saying the ghost dragons are intelligent?”