A Bitter Brew

by Greg Curtis

  “Negotiating?” Suddenly the image of Erohilm was gone and Simone was sitting there. But a younger Simone than the one people knew. A Simone in her prime. Young and fresh and full of life. “I've tried that!”

  “No. I mean negotiating properly. In good faith and from a position of strength and mutual respect. Leave the wars and the fighting to the men. They're good at it. Always playing with sticks and sharp objects. But women know that fighting never solves anything. The only thing that ever works is talking. Negotiating. Finding out what you have that they want, and what they have that you want.”

  “And this is a perfect time for a trade.”

  “A trade?!” It wasn't Dibella who asked. It was Hendrick. The words had almost been torn out of his mouth by shock.

  “Of course. The people of the Empire have what Simone here wants. Her clutch. And they don't want it. Or rather, they only want the eggs do to the rocks. And Simone has what they want – in fact what they now desperately need – the black stones. And she doesn't want them either.” She turned back to her former sister wife. “Do you Simone?”

  “No.” Simone looked dubiously at her. “It's just stone.”

  “Then we have the perfect recipe for a trade. Don't we?”

  “But …” Hendrick tried to think of something to say, but there just wasn't anything in his head. All he could think was that she'd just killed, murdered a million people or more, and his mother wanted to propose a trade deal. He wanted peace. That was why he'd arranged this meeting. But where was the justice in that?!

  There had to be some justice at least. An acknowledgement of ills done. Even an apology if such a thing was possible. But a trade?! It was a wicked jest surely! And despite her apparent anger, he wasn't sure that he believed the Dragon Queen's story either. She was at the very least trying to make things look better for her than they actually were.

  Still, he also knew that this war had to end. If it didn't, in five hundred or a thousand years time the Dragon Queen would be back and the cycle would begin again. Even if she wasn't a behemoth, she was a frighteningly powerful enemy. And the people of the Empire were in desperate need of more magic. They had probably used everything they had left defending Callanar.

  “Now it occurs to me that there must be other lairs about with more black rocks in them, and you would know where they are?” His mother continued with her idea, apparently completely unconcerned by the wrongness of it.

  Simone nodded.

  “And you're willing to give up the hostilities?”

  She nodded again, though she didn't look completely happy. Was that because she wanted to keep fighting Hendrick wondered? Or merely that she didn't trust the people of the Empire to keep their word?

  “Then we can proceed.” His mother said it as if it was a matter already decided.

  But no one else thought that. Hendrick looked around at the others in the visage and saw the same shocked disbelief in their faces that he felt. All around people were standing there, their mouths hanging open. Even Simone was looking doubtful. And Hendrick felt somewhat weak at the knees. It was a long time before any words came to him.

  “No one's going to like that.” Finally he managed to say something.

  “Oh son!” Hendrick's mother stared at him pityingly. “Haven't I taught you better than that?! This is about making a deal. It isn't about what anybody likes. And nobody ever gets everything they want. That's why it’s called compromise! But if it's done well everybody gets what they need. Tell me, do you make any stynes at all with your brewing?!”

  Hendrick had no answer to that. The words just wouldn't come.

  “Now hush. We have terms to discuss for our opening offer.”

  With that and a wave of her fingers Hendrick found himself dismissed again. And so he left the two of them to talk and headed back to work on his house. He wasn't completely sure how things had gone astray so quickly. And he was certain that Vitanna's mist was involved. But at least things seemed peaceful. And though the Queen might be annoyed with him for exposing her secrets, there was nothing she could do about it anymore and killing him would not help.

  When he got to his house though, instead of climbing back up on to the half-finished roof, he sat down on a floor brace, and let the madness of it simply flow past. Somehow they'd gone from a war that had killed millions to some sort of trade negotiation. It just didn't seem real.

  “You look upset.” Val's visage floated towards him. “That is, if I am reading your expression right. It's so hard to tell on a featureless face!”

  “It's just wrong!” He threw his hands to the sky in disbelief, and then turned to stare back at the two women as they sat there, deep in conversation. “It's so very wrong!”

  “Your face? I've been telling you that for ages!”

  “This deal she's talking about.” Hendrick ignored his friend's jibe. “All those dead and injured people. And now they just want to make a deal and forget about them?!”

  “Actually, the solution has a certain poetry to it,” the sage told him. “It's almost mathematical in its logic. It's just a shame no one thought of this ten thousand years ago.”

  “Tell that to the dead.”

  “I agree. It's bitter. The price of peace often is. But it's still a price worth paying. So maybe we shouldn't tell it to the dead. Instead we should tell it to the living and those who will continue to live because of it.”

  “And don’t forget that this is what you wanted. You arranged it. You told your mother only enough to get her to get Simone here. There was no way you were ever going to get justice. You knew that before she walked down that hill. Long before. Whether she was the Queen of Dragons or the behemoth she pretended to be, she was simply too powerful for that. Besides, she's never going to get justice for the millennia she's spent without her clutch. And that's not right either.”

  True, Hendrick thought. But it didn't make it any easier to accept.

  “Do you believe her?” Hendrick asked, not even sure what answer he wanted from his friend.

  “Actually yes. The black crystals were discovered about nine thousand years ago. And while I believe she lessons the evil of her acts, even tries to justify them a little, I don't doubt that there is just cause on her side as well. You believe her too.”

  “I do?” Hendrick didn't realise he did. He heard the words, the story made sense, but that didn't mean it was true.

  “Yes. You kept saying it. That these attacks weren't about anything except rage. Pure rage. Can you think of anything that would enrage a mother more than having her children stolen?”

  Again, it was true. But still, to hold that anger for ten thousand years? He couldn't imagine someone being angry even about that for ten years. It just wasn't … human. But that he supposed was what he kept forgetting. He looked at her and he saw a woman whether she was Erohilm or Simone. But she wasn't a woman at all. She was a dragon. A creature for whom ten thousand years was nothing. And a creature who didn't have any regard for mortal people. Not the way they did. But it was just so hard to wrap his thoughts around that.

  And there was one other thing that rankled.

  “You know, of all the wives, she was the only one that I liked. The one that I thought was most like a mother.” And yet she was the one who had turned out to be the monster.

  “And she quite possibly is. After all, she's spent nearly ten thousand years doing nothing more than trying to get her eggs back. And even on my world we know one thing for certain. You never come between a mother and her children.”

  “Tell that to my mother!” Hendrick laughed bitterly.

  “I would but that might be a mistake.” He looked away. “She scares me.”

  “Val?”

  The sage made a gesture that Hendrick didn't understand. It might have been an attempt at humour. But even if it was a jest he had a point Hendrick realised as he stared at the two women. Both were queens and mothers. And both in their own ways, were monsters. It was then that he understood the tru
th.

  “Val, look at the two of them sitting there. One of them is the Queen of Dragons. The other is a human. And tell me if you can really be sure which is which! I mean they both look so human. But I'm not sure either one of them actually is!”

  Chapter Fifty Five

  Hendrick had only ever been to Callanar once before. But at the time it had been covered with ghost dragons and in flames. He had never actually entered the city. So it was a strange thing to walk the streets of an Empire city, to mingle with the people of it, and to experience the sights and sounds for himself. It was stranger still for him because he had memories of this most ancient of cities from the wizard who'd walked these same streets two thousand years before. Everywhere he went he saw things he'd never seen before or even heard of, but which he recognised.

  He felt things too. Emotions that weren't his. He walked down a street and saw a ruined building – the city was filled with them – and he knew sorrow. It had been a beautiful building. Except that the emotion wasn't his. It belonged to the ancient wizard within him, seeing the ruin of what he'd loved. He saw a park and felt happiness, as he remembered the children playing in it. But not children he had ever seen with his own eyes. He might have defeated the ancient wizard's darkness within his soul, but it was, Hendrick guessed, going to be a long time before he was completely at ease with himself.

  But that didn't matter. What mattered was keeping the cloaked figure in front of him in sight while not being seen. And it wasn't easy. Not because the woman suspected she was being followed, but because she was travelling such a long, circuitous route through a ruined overcrowded city. Everywhere he went he kept being jostled by people who were busy with their own concerns.

  A month and a half had passed since the battle. It had not been a good month for the people of the city. You could not lose a million and a half people and ever consider it good. And while the worst of the shock and grief might have passed, anger had arrived to take its place. Righteous anger. Anger at both the Queen of Dragons and at the Senate.

  The Queen had attacked them after all. And the Senate had lied to them. It had never told the people about the source of magic. And they had brought the wrath of the Queen upon them. Hendrick wasn't sure which of those things upset them more. The people felt betrayed.

  They were also frightened. It was slowly dawning on them that they were in a precarious position. Dibella's army might have been defeated, but not by them and not without a price being paid. A steep one. They had expended nearly all of the remaining magic they had left in the crystals to defend themselves, and it had not been enough. The crystals they had had left that still had some magic were old. Some of them were family heirlooms passed down through the generations. Barely able to be used because they were attuned to the souls of their first owners. Other than them all they had left were the black stones, and the people already knew they couldn't protect themselves from the dragon queen with them. If the war continued, they would lose. Dibella might have lost her army, but she was a dragon, and they had nothing to defend themselves with. They didn't even have enough magic left to repair their city.

  Which made it all the harder for Hendrick to understand why the Senate was still trying to negotiate with Dibella. Their sins had been found out. Their people were frightened and had demanded that they take the deal. They had also demanded that members of the Senate face trial too.

  And it wasn’t as if the deal offered by Dibella was unreasonable. With the black stones offered they would have enough magic left to repair their city and restore things to nearly what they had been. They should just accept the deal and move on. They should have done it on the first day.

  But instead the Senate kept arguing. Wanting clarifications and guarantees. Demanding changes be made to the wording. Requesting delays so they could discuss matters. He didn't know why. His mother didn't know why either. And Dibella was becoming angry. She could feel success so close at hand, and the frustration was getting to her. Soon Hendrick feared, as did everyone else, it would fall apart.

  Which was why he was following Darnial Marn.

  It had become obvious to him as he spent his days being forced to listen to Tyrollan and Marnie while they complained about the negotiations they were required to attend, that she was an important player. She moved among the members of the Senate easily, whispering in ears, or so he understood. And she kept popping up everywhere.

  If anyone knew what was happening, she did. But she clearly wasn’t going to tell him.

  Fortunately the Senate had made a strategic mistake. They'd forgotten about him. They thought that the only people from Styrion visiting them, other than their guests, were the delegation led by his mother. It was a reasonable assumption when they controlled the portals. But not when there was a world walker around. Moreover one who had been to this particular world before and so knew how to get there.

  So instead of spending another day running the Guild while Marnie and Tyrollan attended the negotiations, he'd decided to do some surreptitious investigating. And oddly enough it was easy. He just put on a robe with a cowl and some gloves, walked across the worlds and then into the city, and no one noticed him. His unusual garb wasn't that unusual here. The Mythagan all wore the funny draped dresses, but everyone else wore whatever they liked, and with his hood up and gloves on, no one saw his markings. But mostly he realised as he followed Darnial Marn, they didn't notice him because they weren't interested. They had too much else to worry about.

  Why was the woman taking such a circuitous route through the city? As he walked past one of the thousands of broken floating carriages that littered the city, he worried about that. He kept thinking that maybe she'd spotted him even though she'd given no sign. Granted, the city was in a mess. There were piles of rubble everywhere marking where buildings had once stood. The streets had broken apart completely in places leaving large chasms that he had to jump across. But it still seemed she was taking an unnecessarily long route to get to wherever she was going.

  Regardless he kept following her, working his way around all the obstacles in his way, and she never once looked back at him. Unless she had eyes in the back of her head he thought, she couldn't have seen him.

  It did give him a chance to study the people though. And he noticed that none of them were wearing their crystals. But then why would they? If there was no more magic in them then they were of no use. And it was fairly obvious that these were people with no magic left to them. Most of the cleaning up that was being done, was being done by hand.

  That struck him as strange. In Styrion they would have dealt with things far more quickly. There would have been horses and wagons out in the street as teams worked to clear the debris. Those who had magic and could help would have done so. At the least they would have been using good steel tools. But here they were literally picking through the rubble by hand. Where a chasm had to be crossed, they were laying down planks instead of filling them in. And no one was riding, let alone flying.

  It was clear why the streets were so busy. None of the buildings were functional anymore. Not even the ones that were intact. The ramps that moved up and down no longer worked. And people couldn't fly. So everyone who had lived more than say a dozen or so stories above the ground, was now trapped in the streets. They would probably only come down once a day and stay there to do everything before finally making the journey back up. They simply weren't used to climbing endless flights of stairs.

  Here and there he came across unexpected sights. A man in the middle of one street selling crystals. Not the black rocks. No doubt they had been pulled out of the ruins and off the necks of the dead. Hendrick guessed that these were crystals that had at best only a few spells left in them. Moreover, since the crystals had to be attuned to the wearers' souls, they probably wouldn't work very well. At least not without a lot of effort. But he still had plenty of customers. People were desperate.

  He spotted a fountain in one of the parks that was still working. And people were
bathing in it, drinking from it and filling up heavy jugs of water from it. Most of the plumbing for the city he guessed, had failed.

  And every so often he came across a makeshift brazier. Usually a pile of rubble that had been pulled together into a sort of fire pit, and then filled with anything that would burn. People had gathered around them, usually in their heaviest clothes, talking. More had packs on their backs. These were the people who he guessed no longer had homes, camping on the city streets as they waited for help.

  One thing he didn't spot, were the children playing in the parks. Nor for that matter, animals. Where, he wondered, where were they? The horses that should have been pulling wagons? The dogs that should have been barking and the cats prowling the houses? But then he looked at some of the cuts of meat roasting over the open fires, and an unfortunate answer occurred to him.

  It might be a very long time before the city was rebuilt, he thought.

  Eventually Darnial Marn turned off the broken streets and headed toward a building. And when she did Hendrick knew a moment of relief as she seemed to have found her destination. By then she'd been walking for well over an hour as she navigated her way through the twists and turns of the city and he'd been growing tired. Just before she made to enter the burnt out building, she stopped and looked both ways along the street before going in. That pleased him. It suggested that she didn’t want to be seen – and she didn't know he was following her.