Dragon Nimbus Novels: Vol II, The

by Irene Radford

  Nimbulan sucked on his cheeks to keep from flinching as the guard’s hand patted his groin. Did his hand linger overlong? A test or personal perversion?

  The guard found another knife, a longer blade inside Nimbulan’s boot and a few base coins tucked inside his shirt. Then he searched the multiple folds and pockets of Nimbulan’s all-concealing black robe.

  “Gold!” The guard’s eyes widened as he felt the weight of the three coins.

  “A good day’s haul. Drinks are on you when we go off duty,” the other guard laughed.

  “He’s clean,” the first guard said as he pocketed the coins.

  “This one is clean, too,” said a second guard, straightening from searching Rollett. The horrible humming ceased abruptly.

  Nimbulan wondered if the word “clean” triggered the release. He rotated his shoulders and looked up at the guards. “You gonna search me?”

  “Already have. Aander here will carry your knives to the far side of the tunnel and give them back to you there. Enjoy the Kaalipha’s protection for two days. After that you have to find a sponsor and join normal work details or leave.” One of the guards opened the gate.

  Nimbulan moved past the iron bars. A strange tingle snaked across his skin. Some kind of magic, but unlike any he’d encountered in all his years as a Battlemage. He willed his body not to shiver at the alien touch. Nor did he look at Rollett to see if he felt the same tingle. Aander watched them too closely.

  A long dark tunnel stretched forward, perhaps three hundred long paces. Lanterns at the far end revealed another barred gate and four more guards. Would they have to go through the same search again? Nimbulan sighed wearily, preparing to ignore the horrible ringing noise and the humiliating search one more time.

  The next guard nodded briefly to Aander as he flashed his wand across the proffered knives. Then he opened the second gate. Apparently the Kaalipha trusted her guards enough to forgo a second test.

  At last he stepped out of the tunnel, into the city proper.

  “No weapons inside the palace or the tunnel. The wands remember the people and weapons, so don’t try sneaking anybody out. You have two days to find a sponsor or get out—the two of you together and no one else with you. Without any other weapons. Other than that there aren’t a whole lot of rules in Hanassa. There’s lots of hiring of mercenaries right now. You’ll find a sponsor easy, if you really want to stay.” Aander handed the knives back to Nimbulan and Rollett. Now to find Myri and get her past these vigilant guards and their magical wands.

  Chapter 19

  “Do something, Kalen. Oh, please help me get this chain off my neck!” Myri begged her daughter when the girl finally returned to their quarters. She couldn’t take a chance that the next time the bizarre whistle stabbed her brain the weakness left over from her infancy might rupture.

  Then sun was nearly down and the air stifling. Even sight of the dark blue sky above the crater rim didn’t ease her near panic.

  Breathe deeply. In three counts, hold three, out three. She remembered Nimbulan’s patient coaching from their first days together. He’d been teaching her to trigger a trance. She had to be relaxed before the trance would work.

  She inhaled deeply on three counts, trying desperately to still her racing mind and scattered thoughts.

  “Don’t you want to hear my news first?” Kalen stuck out her lower lip in a good imitation of a pout. Her eyes opened wide and filled with moisture. She hadn’t resorted to that expression in Myri’s presence for nearly a year.

  “News?” Memory of Kalen’s errand to discover Powwell’s whereabouts broke through her anxiety about the necklace. Hard on the heels of her elation about news of Powwell’s whereabouts came awareness that Yaassima listened to every word she said through the dragon pendant.

  “I . . . I can’t listen now, Kalen. Can you do anything about this necklace?” Yaassima would expect her to try to break the necklace. Myri didn’t feel safe telling Kalen about the Kaalipha’s eavesdropping. She did look pointedly at the two guards who stood so stiffly by the door, also listening.

  Kalen’s expression closed. She dropped her gaze with all the innocence and shyness of a normal little girl. “I don’t know how to do it.” She waved at the offensive necklace biting her lip. “You’ll have to free yourself.”

  Kalen never looked directly at someone when she told the truth. She used her wide-eyed innocence act to cover deceit.

  And yet, Myri’s magical senses picked up defiance. What was happening inside Kalen’s complex thoughts?

  She had to trust the girl. They’d been close for a long time. Kalen had learned to trust Myri, though Powwell was the only male she would allow past her defensive barriers. Kalen wouldn’t betray Myri, her foster mother.

  “I can’t break the magical hold the necklace has on me, Kalen. I’ve tried. It chains me to Yaassima and this place. I have to get it off!” Myri intended to tell the listening woman precisely what she expected to hear and nothing more.

  Kalen shrugged and moved toward Amaranth’s cradle near the window, rocking it idly with her toe. The baby cooed and gurgled in response. Kalen sneered and turned her head away from the baby.

  Myri caught jealousy and resentment from the girl’s unbridled emotions. How could she resent an innocent baby?

  Because little Amaranth devoured all of Myri’s attention. She had little left to give Kalen. “Babies require a lot of attention,” Myri said to her older daughter. “But just because my attention is on the baby doesn’t mean I love you any less.”

  Kalen sniffed and refused to look at anything but the blank wall.

  Myri reached out to touch the girl, fearful of losing all of the emotional stability they had built together.

  Suddenly Kalen looked up, eyes alert, shoulders back and spine stiff. A trance of some sort. Myri had seen the posture often enough in her husband. But she’d never seen Kalen bother with the altered mind state that made a magician receptive to weaving or receiving spells.

  “What is it, Kalen?”

  The girl remained silent. A streak of dark fur sprang from a crack in the wall and slithered up the girl’s leg, clinging to the fabric of her skirt until it reached her shoulder where it wrapped around her neck.

  “Kalen!” Myri shook her daughter’s shoulder. She had to break the trance. “Wiggles is back. Wake up and listen to your familiar.”

  The ferret might very well carry a message of danger. Both Kalen and Myri were vulnerable to magic here in this city filled with Bloodmages, Rovers, and other malcontent magicians. The trance could blind Kalen to magical manipulation.

  “Nimbulan is dead,” Kalen whispered through stiff lips. Her hand crept up automatically to caress Wiggles. The ferret chirped ecstatically.

  “What?” Shock rooted Myri in place. All thought deserted her. “I won’t believe it.” Kalen didn’t know about the magical link between Myri and Nimbulan. No one could see it but themselves.

  Kalen lied.

  “Believe it. Wiggles brought me a vision. I saw Nimbulan in a great battle on the bay. Drowning. Waves and waves of water. Water pushing him down and down. No air. No strength. Blackness.” Kalen barely roused from her trance.

  “He can’t be dead. I’d know it,” Myri protested. Kalen and the eavesdropping Yaassima would expect her to say that.

  How had Wiggles observed a battle on the Great Bay when he’d last been seen in the clearing, several days’ ride south of any access to that body of water? He had no reason to go north to Nimbulan—whom he’d never met. Myri presumed the ferret had either sought Kalen out or come with her and then gotten lost in the city and the maze of tunnels that made up the palace.

  Myri clutched her chest, trying to calm the frantic pulse. But her panic came from the knowledge that Kalen lied and Wiggles was her partner in deceit. She had no reason to grieve yet over the loss of her husband.

  The silver tendril pulsed a normal heart rhythm. It grew stronger and thicker beneath her fingers, as if . . . as if N
imbulan had suddenly come closer.

  Perhaps Kalen had been misled by her sneaky ferret—could the animal have been tampered with? Not likely. The bonds between a witchwoman and her familiar were strong and convoluted, but exclusive.

  She opened her mouth to ask the girl for details, to find the source of the deceptive message.

  The half curl of satisfaction on the right side of Kalen’s mouth told Myri more than she wanted to know. Even if she knew the information to be a lie, Kalen wanted Nimbulan dead and Myri lost in grief for him. Why?

  Powwell swallowed his fears. Televarn had stepped from somewhere else into the tunnels. This was the same route they had taken from the clearing, through the pit and into the lower levels of the palace.

  Yaala said it was a hallucination, induced by the heat and dehydration. Powwell knew what he had seen. Knew what he had experienced during the kidnap and his first few moments of awareness.

  Thorny confirmed his impression as he waddled up to Powwell and begged to be picked up. As Powwell cradled the little hedgehog in his palm, his familiar replayed scents through Powwell’s memory. This tunnel branching off from Old Bertha’s cavern smelled different than any other tunnel in the pit.

  If Televarn could come and go from this hellhole, then Powwell could, too.

  He tucked Thorny into his tunic pocket, letting his familiar’s nose work with him. With one hand on the wall and the other extended, palm outward, as a sensor, he crept forward. At each step he stopped and extended his senses as far as he could, looking for something different about this particular tunnel. Thorny had poor eyesight but keen smell. All he could tell Powwell was that this place was different and he didn’t like it.

  Powwell rotated his left hand, much as Nimbulan did when seeking information or weaving the magic of the Kardia. His palm was sweating, as it had almost continuously since he’d been thrown down here. Nothing else infiltrated his searching senses.

  One more step brought him within sight of the heaving lava at the core of the volcano. The churning mass seemed quieter, grayer, less liquid today.

  A hot wind blasted his face. Power tingled along the fine hairs of his arms.

  Suddenly the view lurched and shifted into a circling vortex of vivid red, green, yellow, and black.

  Powwell’s head spun. His stomach bounced. He slammed his eyes closed. The Kardia righted. Only his eyes sensed movement.

  Slowly he pried open first one eye then the other. Before him lay a desert. Rock and soil—more rock than soil—lay bare in the brilliant sunshine, bleached of color by the bright light. He sensed reds and yellows beneath the glare. Strange arched rock formations sprang up out of nowhere. Mountains rose in the distance, more desert. The only vegetation in sight were stunted grasses growing out of rock crevices in the shade of larger rocks.

  Just as suddenly as the view came to him, the scene lurched back into the swirling vortex. The hot wind died and the crackling energy faded.

  Powwell grabbed the wall for balance, trying desperately to keep his vertigo in check while he kept the unknown desert in view.

  The circles of colors and light faded and the pit returned to its normal place below the tunnel opening.

  “Powwell, what are you doing down here? Staring at the pit will only mesmerize you into joining it. That is an honor reserved for the dead,” Yaala said from right behind him.

  Rather than answer the woman, he examined the edges of the tunnel opening, seeking a spell or other anomaly that would explain the sudden vision of distant places.

  “Did you hear me, Powwell?” She tugged at his arm, attempting to draw him back through the tunnel. Behind her, Old Bertha belched and chugged in a normal machine rhythm.

  “I heard. I also saw another place. I think this archway is a portal to other places.” He didn’t take his eyes off the opening.

  “Nonsense. I told you you were hallucinating. I saw all kinds of things down here when my . . . when Yaassima first banished me. You’ll get used to the heat eventually.”

  “How long have you been here, Yaala?” Powwell finally shifted his gaze from the portal to her face. Her heavy-lidded eyes masked her emotions, almost fading into her pale skin. He wondered briefly if he would take on the same ghastly pallor after an eternity away from sunlight. Her high cheekbones nearly poked through her skin, revealing a long face with a determinedly outthrust chin.

  No one in the pit was overweight. Most of them were gaunt skeletons, wasted away from short rations, debilitating heat, and hard work. Yaala was the healthiest of the lot and by the reckoning of some of the old men, had been here longer than most.

  How much of that time was exile and how much her own choice? Powwell was suddenly fascinated with this strangely competent and self-assured woman. Almost beautiful underneath the dust and gauntness. The first stirring of interest tingled in his body.

  “What use counting time when there is no sun to mark the passage of days?” She kept those heavy eyelids lowered as she turned her gaze to the boiling lava in the pit.

  A spurt of lava flared up. She opened her eyes wide in the sudden red light. Powwell had never noticed the color of her eyes beneath her normally heavy lids. He couldn’t see it now. A film covered her iris.

  “Are you blind, Yaala?” He touched her back with a gentle hand as he looked more closely at her eyes. She dropped her gaze to her boots and wrenched away from his touch.

  The pronounced bones of her spine brushed against his palm. The bumps were much bigger than those of a normal person and sharp, very sharp. He jerked his hand away, then tentatively replaced it, needing to make contact with another human being in this hellhole.

  “No, I am not blind.” She paused and swallowed heavily. “Come. We have work to do. Old Bertha still isn’t working properly, and some of the pipes are corroded. They’ll have to be replaced.”

  “I don’t want to stay down here, Yaala. I’ve got to get out of here. I can’t live like this.”

  “Get used to it. Death is the only escape from the pit, and you’ve seen how we dispose of the bodies.” She turned on her heel and marched back toward the machinery.

  Powwell looked once more to the portal, longing for a vision of the green trees that had surrounded Televarn just before he stepped into the tunnel.

  The vortex lurched again, spiraling green, red, yellow, and blue—the blue of a summer sky above Coronnan. His mouth longed for the taste of fresh, sweet water. His skin clamored for relief from the heat. His heart begged for freedom.

  “Look, Yaala. It’s doing it again!”

  “Hallucination born of desperation. I’ve seen it before.” She kept walking away from the portal, one hand on Powwell’s sleeve, dragging him with her.

  “Trees! It will take us to Coronnan.” Powwell pulled his arm free of her grasp and took two rapid steps toward escape.

  Don’t leave me alone, Kalen’s mental voice pleaded with him. You have to take me with you. You have to get me out of here. You are the only one who loves me.

  He slumped sadly against the wall. He had to wait.

  Come to me soon, Kalen. I can’t endure this much longer.

  Chapter 20

  “I will have to lie through my teeth to convince these hidebound lords,” Quinnault said quietly. He patted Katie’s hand where it rested on his arm. Since the conclusion of the negotiations with Kinnsell, he had been in constant touch with her. He kept a gentle hand at the small of her back, her hand on his arm; he brushed a stray curl from her brow; or brushed his leg against hers as they walked.

  At each touch her mind brushed his, and he knew completeness. He didn’t know everything about her yet. But he knew enough. She still had secrets from him, but she couldn’t lie to him.

  If she stepped beyond his reach for more than a heartbeat, or withdrew her mind from his, he felt cold and awkward and terribly, achingly alone.

  They paused outside the Council Chamber where the lords in residence had been hastily summoned to approve the royal marriage.

>   “I was told that your government is new. How can these men be hidebound?” Her humor sparkled in her eyes like green stars. A mature humor despite her childlike stature. The top of her head only reached his shoulder. Her figure was hidden beneath her old-fashioned gown with a long train. The heavy woolen fabric must weigh a ton. And she’d worn it beneath the now cast-off draperies. Why wasn’t she suffering from the heat generated by the thick cloth?

  He wished she’d share the joke with him.

  “My lords come from a long tradition of caution. Some of them believe that we have recreated the government by the few for the few. My sense of responsibility for the people and the land is new to them. They will see you as a disruption of their carefully protected privilege. Each has a candidate for my bride. They seek only to bind me closer to them and away from others rather than thinking of the security of the entire kingdom.”

  “Then we will have to convince them that I am precisely what they want me to be, a foreign princess who brings trade to make them rich and you grateful to them for their wealth.” Her full lips pouted, and she bit her cheeks trying to hide a smile.

  “They will want to see a signed treaty.”

  “I will have Kinnsell draw one up in the morning.” This time the smile burst through her attempts at restraint.

  Quinnault lost contact with the Kardia and his head as he stared at her mouth, longing to kiss her.

  “We are to be married tomorrow and you haven’t kissed me yet. Isn’t it customary to seal a betrothal with a kiss?” She looked up at him, mouth slightly parted, eyes completely serious.

  “Did you read my mind again?”

  “I didn’t have to. Kiss me, Scarecrow. Kiss me and make me forget my fears.”

  “You are a princess. Diplomatic marriages are expected of the offspring of an emperor.”