Eventually, however, he arrived at his destination, only to find it empty and deserted, hardly surprising, as dawn was still more than two hours off. He settled down in a doorway to wait.
He was shaken roughly awake and sat up, blinking.
“What in Hell are you doing sleeping there? Don’t you know that’s against the law? If you haven’t got any place of your own, you go sleep on Wall Street with the other beggars, you don’t sleep here! We don’t allow vagrants on the city streets.” The red-kilted soldier glared down at him, his left hand on his hip and his right on the hilt of his sword.
“Oh...” Tobas managed, “I must have dozed off.” Thinking as best he could under the circumstances, he added, “I’m meeting a recruiter here.”
“What kind of a recruiter?” the soldier asked suspiciously. “For the Guards?”
“Ah, no,” Tobas said, hoping desperately that the soldier would not be offended by a lack of interest in a military career. “From the Small Kingdoms.” He was not actually sure what sort of recruiter he would choose, but that seemed reasonable.
“One of those, ha? That’s trouble enough, I’d say, without my adding to it. Suit yourself, boy. But if I catch you sleeping in the streets of Shiphaven again, I’ll flog you half to death and then turn you over to the slavers, this is a respectable neighborhood.”
“Yes, sir,” Tobas agreed immediately.
“I should turn you over to the slavers now, you know; that’s the penalty for vagrancy. Even a foreigner should know that.”
“But I just dozed off! I wasn’t really sleeping here!” Tobas spoke before the significance of that “foreigner” could sink in.
“All right, boy, I said I should, not that I will. You can go, but I’ll keep an eye on you, and you better be telling the truth about waiting for a recruiter.”
Tobas nodded desperately, praying that the man hadn’t recognized his Pirate Town accent. The soldier seemed satisfied. He stepped back and allowed the Freelander to get to his feet.
Beyond the soldier, Tobas could see that the sky was gray with the approaching dawn and that already a few men, and one woman, the princess he had seen almost two days before, were standing here and there about the square, waiting for potential customers. Eager to be rid of the soldier, Tobas headed directly for the nearest, a middle-aged man in green-dyed deerskin.
“Ho, there, boy,” the man said at Tobas’ approach. “Are you looking for a quick and easy road to wealth and glory? I’m looking for a few brave souls who are willing to help my homeland of Dwomor in its hour of need.”
“What sort of hour of need?” Tobas asked warily. “A war?”
“Oh, no, my lad! Not a war at all! Merely a minor nuisance that’s been harrying a few of our far-flung mountain outposts.”
“Bandits?”
Before the recruiter could answer, the soldier was at Tobas’ shoulder.
“Is this the one?” he demanded.
Terrified at the prospect of being caught in a lie and sold into slavery, as either vagrant or enemy alien, Tobas nodded. “This is he, sir.”
“You’re signing this boy up?” the soldier asked the recruiter.
The recruiter was not about to pass up an opportunity like this. “Yes, indeed, sir, it’s all agreed!”
“All right, then; get on with it.” He turned and stalked away.
Tobas watched him go, then turned back to the recruiter and asked, “Now, what’s this nuisance of yours, bandits?”
“First, lad, I’ll ask you to sign here.” He pulled a document from his sleeve.
“Oh, no!” Tobas protested, “not until I know what’s going on!”
“Oh, indeed? Shall I call back that fine soldier and tell him I made a mistake and that I never saw you before this morning?”
Tobas glanced at the soldier’s retreating back and reluctantly accepted the proffered pen. He signed his name neatly, “Tobas of Telven,” then handed back the pen and demanded, “All right, what’s this nuisance?”
“It’s not bandits, it’s a dragon. It’s been eating people up in the mountains, and when it doesn’t eat people, it eats sheep, which is almost as bad.”
“A dragon?” Tobas stared for a moment, then looked after the soldier again, wondering how bad slavery could be.
“Oh, it’s not that bad,” the recruiter said. “And the reward is really something worth having, the hand of a princess in marriage, a respected position for life at Dwomor Keep, and best of all, one thousand gold pieces!”
Tobas gaped stupidly for several seconds. “A hundredweight of gold?” he squeaked at last.
“That’s right.”
After all, he thought, how dangerous could a dragon be? Every well-stocked wizard had ajar of dragon’s blood on his shelves, and the legends said that during the Great War dragons had been tamed and trained. A reward of that magnitude was worth a little risk, with that much money he could, as his advisor had suggested, come back and buy a few spells. Not that he’d need to; he could live quite comfortably for the rest of his life on that much! And all that without even considering the position or the princess.
The princess, he was not at all sure he wanted to marry anyone as yet, princess or otherwise. If one of the prettier young women in Telven had shown an interest, he might well have married, but they had never really taken him seriously after he apprenticed himself to old Roggit, and he was not eager to wed a stranger, someone from an entirely different background. Well, if by some miracle he somehow did kill the dragon, surely he need not accept all the reward; let some worthy prince marry her. Tobas would settle for the money.
Of course, he thought, he mustn’t count the money before he had it; he had no idea how to kill a dragon. He knew almost nothing about dragons. He had never seen any, but they had figured in various stories he had heard as a child; they reportedly came in various sizes and shapes and colors. Some were said to breathe fire; some were said to speak in various languages and to be as dangerous with their clever tongues as with their claws and teeth. During the Great War, both sides had reportedly trained them to kill the enemy. A dragon could be almost anything. He would need to look the situation over carefully and see just what the story was, what sort of a dragon this Dwomor had roaming the hills. If the odds looked too bad, and realism told him that dragon slaying couldn’t be easy, if these people had sent a recruiter all the way to Ethshar to find volunteers, he would simply leave. At least he would be somewhere new; Dwomor, whatever and wherever it might be, might well have more opportunities available to him than Ethshar. He would not be an enemy there simply by virtue of his homeland, either; he had never heard of anyone sinking or capturing ships from any place called Dwomor.
He could not possibly be much worse off wandering in Dwomor than wandering in Ethshar, he told himself, and at least, as a recruited dragon slayer, he wouldn’t have to worry about being sold into slavery as a vagrant.
“All right,” he said. “You’ve got a recruit. When do we leave?”
The recruiter smiled. “Oh, not for some time yet; I’m hoping to bring back a dozen young adventurers like yourself.” He raised his voice and began calling to the handful of Ethsharites entering the market square. “Here’s your chance for riches and glory! A chance to travel and see the world! Come over here, folks, and let me tell you all about it!”
Tobas’ stomach growled, and he sighed. He was committed now; he would either have to face a dragon of unknown size and ferocity or break his signed agreement and desert somewhere in the Small Kingdoms. He could not stay in Ethshar.
At the very least, if the recruiter wanted Tobas to reach Dwomor well enough to go dragon hunting, the blackmailing scoundrel would have to feed him sometime soon.
CHAPTER 8
When they finally boarded the ship, there were nine of them in all; the recruiter seemed well pleased with his catch.
Tobas was not well pleased with anything. His companions seemed to be either fools or blackguards, which made him wonder which catego
ry he belonged in. The ship was small, crowded, and stank of fish, and Tobas had doubts about its seaworthiness. Worst of all, the meals were sparse and unappetizing, consisting largely of stale bread and ill-flavored cheese served with cheap, warm beer.
Even this food, however, was better than nothing, and his narrow, scratchy hammock was better than sleeping in the streets.
He could not quite bring himself to complain to the recruiter about the conditions; but by the second night at sea, he could no longer resist complaining to someone and unburdened himself to the rather plump, baby-faced young man, roughly his own age, in the adjoining hammock.
“Oh, but it’s an adventure!” Tillis Tagath’s son burbled happily. “Hardship and sorrow toughen a man for battle!”
Tillis, in Tobas’ opinion, was very definitely one of the fools among the recruits.
“I don’t think they’re toughening us for battle,” Tobas replied. “I think they’re just too cheap to do better. It makes me suspicious about that reward of a hundred pounds of gold.”
“Oh? Do you think they’re lying?” Tillis turned and stared at him with wide, worried eyes.
Tobas sighed. “Not exactly lying, perhaps,” he said. “But exaggerating a little.”
“Oh, but they wouldn’t dare refuse anything to the man who slays the dragon! What would the people think? Surely the peasants would rise up against any king so treacherous as to refuse the kingdom’s savior what might be due him!”
Tillis, Tobas thought, talked like a storyteller and was undoubtedly aboard the foul-smelling and nameless little ship as a result of listening to too many storytellers. “I wouldn’t put much trust in peasants,” he said. “Nor in kings, either. Do you know anything about this place we’re going to, Dwomor I think it’s called?”
“It’s in the mountains in the Small Kingdoms, and they say it was the original capital of Old Ethshar.”
Startled, Tobas asked, “Who says so?”
“The Dwomorites, of course!”
“Oh, of course.” He settled back in his hammock again. From what he had always heard, virtually every one of the Small Kingdoms claimed to be the original capital — or else its government claimed to be the rightful government of all Ethshar. Or both. If any capital had ever actually existed, its location was long since forgotten. “Tillis,” he asked, “how do you expect to kill a dragon?”
“I don’t know,” Tillis confessed. “I hadn’t really thought about it. How big a dragon do you suppose it is?”
“I don’t know,” Tobas replied. “But it’s big enough to eat people.”
“That’s pretty big,” Tillis said, his voice hushed and uncertain. Then, more confidently, “But a good sword and a stout heart should serve!”
“Tillis,” Tobas said in exasperation, “unless you’ve been hiding it somewhere in the hold, you haven’t got a sword.”
“No, I don’t, but I can get one from the castle armory, I’m sure.”
Tobas sighed again. “What in the world made you decide to sign up to be a dragon slayer, anyway?”
Tillis was silent for a long moment before replying, “Sixteen siblings.”
“What?”
“I have sixteen older siblings. Every single inheritance or apprenticeship or wealthy marriage, or any sort of arranged marriage, my parents could possibly claim was spoken for before they got to me. Nine brothers and seven sisters can use up a lot of property, and my parents were never rich.”
Tobas whistled. “If they were raising seventeen children, it’s no wonder! They wouldn’t have time to get rich, and that crowd would eat it as fast as they brought it in!”
Tillis nodded silently.
Tobas lay for a moment, trying to imagine what it would be like to live in such a large family. He had sometimes pretended Peretta and Detha and Garander were his siblings instead of his cousins, but he had never considered what a really large family would be like.
He didn’t think he would like it. “How old’s the oldest?” he asked.
Before Tillis could answer, a voice came from another hammock. “Aren’t you two ever going to shut up?” “Sorry,” Tobas said. He rolled over to face the wall. The speaker was one of those he had classified as blackguards or scoundrels, a small man with a scarred face, at least ten years older than himself, who carried no fewer than three knives. Tobas had not caught his entire name — Arnen of something.
He was not someone Tobas cared to argue with.
He lay silently awake for some time after that, reassured that there were others, like Tillis, at least as ill prepared as himself, but more worried than ever about facing the dragon. He had assumed that the crew would include a genuine dragon fighter or two, so that, if a mere unskilled nobody like himself were to hang back or simply vanish, nobody would much care, and the dragon would eventually be disposed of just the same.
Now that he had met the other recruits, he was not at all sure that as a wizard, even a wizard with a single spell, he might not be the best chance the kingdom of Dwomor had. Dragons were usually said to breathe fire and were therefore presumably fire-resistant, but some way of using Thrindle’s Combustion against a dragon might still exist.
He dozed at last, as the ship sailed on into the east.
At dawn the next day, the lookout sighted land ahead; they had crossed the Gulf of the East, leaving the Hegemony of Ethshar for the Small Kingdoms. Tobas and the other adventurers came on deck to see the jagged, rocky coastline for themselves.
“Is that Dwomor?” someone asked a crewwoman, pointing at the cliffs.
“No, of course not,” she replied in heavily accented Ethsharitic. “Unless the captain’s gotten us off course again, that’s Morria; we should be able to see the castle in an hour or so.”
Tobas had never actually seen a castle, though he had heard numerous descriptions, some of them going into elaborate detail; the only castles were in the Small Kingdoms, the other nations of the World being either too advanced and peaceful or too barbaric and primitive to have any. He resolved to watch carefully, so as not to miss it. One story he had heard as a child had described a castle as a great pile of stone, leading him to believe that some were camouflaged, and he was afraid that he might mistake this one for a natural outcropping.
He need not have worried; Morria Castle towered up quite unmistakably atop a low cliff, with no fewer than six turrets jutting above its battlements.
“Will we be putting in there?” he asked, noticing the small harbor below the cliff.
“No,” a sailor replied briefly.
“What’s our course, then?”
The crewman looked him over. “You’ve been to sea before?” He spoke with the accent of Ethshar of the Spices.
“My father was a captain, and I worked my passage to Ethshar,” Tobas replied.
The sailor nodded. “Well, we’ll be cruising down the length of Morria here, and on past Stralya, and then up the river at Londa to Ekeroa, where we’ll put your party ashore. No stops; I think your leader is afraid he’d lose some of you if we put in anywhere before that. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s right, in fact, he’ll probably lose a couple during the overland trip. It’s a good seven leagues of rough travel from Ekeroa to Dwomor Keep.”
“You’ve been there?”
“Not I!” The sailor laughed, though Tobas saw nothing humorous in the question. “No, I’ve never been there, but all the traffic from Dwomor comes along the same route. There isn’t any other way, I suppose.”
“Oh. Ah... have you heard anything about this dragon?”
“A little. Rumors say it’s a fifty-footer, that’s a bad size, big enough to be smart and strong, small enough to be fast and vicious. It breathes fire, they say, but that might be an exaggeration. Some people seem to think all dragons do.”
Tobas shivered. “You’re not very encouraging.” “Oh, don’t worry,” the sailor said. “It’s not all your problem. Look at all these other heroes coming to kill it. And this is just the group from Ethshar of
the Spices; there are bound to be others as well. Chances are the old king will be sending an entire army of volunteers against the poor beast, and you’ll be lucky to get a few whacks at its tail.” He paused. “Assuming they don’t all back out, anyway. It’s a mystery to me why he didn’t just hire a real expert; there must be some. Maybe he couldn’t find any.”
Tobas, who had wondered the same thing, glanced at his comrades, those who were on deck, at any rate. Tillis was staring eagerly ahead, holding onto a foremast shroud and staggering every time the ship rolled. Arnen was talking to a knot of off-watch sailors by the mainmast; Tobas thought he saw the flash of coins and suspected that the group was involved in some sort of wager. Three others — Peren the White, Arden Adar’s son, and a fifteen-year-old orphan girl named Azraya of Ethshar whom Tobas suspected of being not merely a fool but actually insane — were in various places on deck.
The other three were presumably below somewhere, still being seasick. Peren, whose cognomen came from his bone-white hair and pale skin, had been sick the first day, but recovered quickly; the others had not been bothered.
None of them looked much like dragon slayers to Tobas. He was, so far as he knew, the only magician in the bunch; Peren had the only real sword, and Arden, between them in age, was the only particularly large, strong one. It was confusing, having both an Arnen and an Arden, at least they had no two with exactly the same name, and no one named Kelder. Practically every village in the Free Lands, and presumably every street in Ethshar, held a Kelder or two.
Tobas classed Arnen and two of the trio struck down by seasickness as scoundrels and the other five as various sorts of fool. Peren, a tall, thin, frail fellow two or three years older than Tobas, seemed determined to prove he was stronger than anyone else, which he obviously wasn’t, though he might well outclass Tobas; Arden, a big man in his twenties, was simply stupid; Azraya, fifteen and wild, was perpetually angry about something and would willfully misinterpret anything said to her as an insult; Tillis was lost in ancient legends of heroism; and the seasick Elner seemed to honestly believe he could single-handedly slay the dragon and, in his lucid moments before succumbing to the ship’s motion, had already been bragging about how he would spend his reward money.
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