“What were they?” he asked, wrapping his fingers again around the grip of the weapon.
“My father worked with what was given on the tablet and deciphered three more of the spell’s words.”
“What were they?”
“The words he was certain of were—Thanry, Meltmoss, Stilthery, Quasum, and Pik.”
“All common herbs,” said Toler.
She nodded. “He believed that all the words constituted a kind of medicine, that if prepared and inserted into one of your victim’s coral mouths, it would reverse the sword’s power and return them to flesh. The blade’s damage could, of course, have been a death blow, in which case there would be no chance of returning them to life, but those who succumbed to only a nick, a scratch, a cut, would again be flesh and bone and draw breath.”
“I’ve often wondered about the inscription,” he said. “Your father was a wise man.”
“I’m giving you the book,” she said. “When I heard you’d turned up at the gate, I remembered my father telling me about his discoveries. The book should belong to the man who carries the weapon. I have no use for it.”
“Why would the blade hold an antidote to the sword’s effects, and yet be written in a language no one can understand?” asked Toler.
“That fact suggests a dozen possible motives, but I suppose the real one will remain a mystery.” She held the book out toward him. As he leaned forward to take it from her, she also leaned forward, and as his fingers closed on the book, her lips met his. She kissed him eagerly, her mouth open. They parted, and he moved closer to the edge of the stone bench. He put his hands on her shoulders and gently drew her toward him.
“Wait, is that Greppen, spying?” she said, bringing her arms up between them. Toler drew his sword as he stood and spun around, brandishing it in a defensive maneuver. He saw no sign of Greppen, heard no movement among the willow branches. What he heard instead was the laughter of Lady Maltomass. When he turned back to her, she was gone. He looked up to see the chair rising into the blue sky. As she floated away toward the tree line, he yelled, “When will I see you next?”
“Soon,” she called back.
Two days passed without word from her and, in that time, all Toler could think of was their last meeting. He tried to stay busy within the walls of the palace, and the beauty of the place kept his attention for half a day, but ultimately, in its ease and refinement, palace life seemed hollow to one who’d spent most of his life in combat.
On the evening of the second day, after dinner, he summoned Councilor Greppen, who was to see to his every need. They met in Toler’s room, and the toad man had brought a bottle of brandy and two glasses. As he poured for himself and The Coral Heart, he said, “I can smell your frustration, Ismet Toler.”
“You can, can you, Prince of Toads? Tell her I want to see her.”
“She’ll summon you when she’s ready.”
“She is in every way a perfect woman,” said Toler, sipping his brandy.
“Perfection is in the eye of the beholder,” said Greppen. “If you were to see my wife, considered quite a beauty among our people, you might not agree.”
“I’m sure she’s lovely,” said the swordsman, “but I feel if I don’t soon have a tryst with Lady Maltomass, I’m going to go mad and turn the world to coral.”
Greppen laughed. “The beast with two backs? Your people are comical in their lust.”
“I suppose,” said Toler. “How do you do it? With a thought?” He sipped at the brandy.
“Very nearly,” said Greppen, lifting the bottle to refill his companion’s glass.
“Here’s a question for you, Councilor,” said Toler. “Does she ever leave the chair?”
“Only to go to bed,” he said. “I would think of all people, you might understand best. She shares her spirit with it as you do The Coral Heart. She knows what the world looks like from above the clouds. She can fly.”
Toler finished his second drink, and told Greppen he was turning in. On the way out the door, the Councilor called back, “Patience.” Once in bed, again he summoned Garone and sent him forth to discover any secrets he might. The swordsman then grasped the sheath and the grip and fell into a troubled sleep.
He tossed and turned, his desire for the Lady working its way into his dreams. Deep in the night, her face rose above the horizon bigger than the moon. He looked into her eyes to see if he could tell their color, but in them he saw instead the figures of Garone and Mamresh on the stone bench, beneath the willows, in the moonlight. His tulpa’s robe was pulled up to his waist, and Mamresh sat upon his lap, facing away, her legs on either side of his. She was panting and moving quickly to and fro, and he was grunting. Then Garone tilted his head back and the hood began to slip off.
Toler woke suddenly to avoid seeing his servant’s face. He was drenched in sweat and breathing heavily. “I’ve got to get away from here,” he said. Still, he stayed on, three more days. On the evening of the third day, he gave orders for the grooms to ready Nod for travel early in the morning. Before turning in, he went to the balcony and sat, staring out at the stars. “Garone, you were right,” he said aloud. “I’ve fallen in love, but tribulation and certain death might have been preferable.” He dozed off.
A few minutes later, he awoke to the sound of Greppen’s footfalls receding into the distance. He sat up, and as he did, he discovered a pale yellow envelope in his lap. For The Coral Heart was inscribed across the front. The back was affixed with wax, bearing, what he assumed, was the official seal of the House of Maltomass, ornate lettering surrounding the image of an owl with a snake writhing in its beak. He tore it open and read, “Come now to my chambers. Your Lady.”
He sprang up off the divan and summoned Garone to lead him. They moved quickly through the halls, the tulpa skimming along above the blue marble floors like a ghost. In the Hall of Tears, they came upon a staircase and climbed up four flights. At the top of those steps was a sitting room, at the back of which was a large wooden door, opened only a sliver. Toler instructed Garone to stand guard and to alert him if anyone approached. He carefully opened the door and entered into a dark room that led into a hall at the end of which he saw a light. He put his left hand around the grip of the sword and proceeded.
Before reaching the lighted chamber he smelled the vague scent of orange oil and cinnamon. As he stepped out of the darkness of the hall, the first thing that caught his attention was Lady Maltomass, sitting up, supported by large silk pillows, in her canopied bed. The coverlet was drawn up to her stomach and beneath it she was naked. The sight of her breasts halted his advance.
“Come to practice your swordsmanship?” she said.
He swallowed hard and tried to say, “At your service.”
She laughed at his consternation. “Come closer,” she said, her voice softer now, “and dispense with those clothes.”
He undressed before her, quickly removing every article of clothing. When he stood naked before her, though, he still had on his belt and the sheathed sword.
“One sword is useful here, the other not,” she said.
“I never take it off,” he said.
“Hurry now. Put it right here on my night table.”
He reluctantly removed the sword. Then he sat on the edge of the bed and put his arms around her. They kissed more passionately than they had in the clearing. He ran his fingers through her hair as she clasped her hands behind his back and kissed his chest. He moved his hands down to her breasts and she reached for his prick. When their ardor was well inflamed, she pulled away from him, and then slowly leaning forward, whispered in his ear, “Do you want me?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Then, come in,” she said and, grabbing the corner of the blanket, threw it back for him.
For a moment, Ismet Toler wore the same look of terrible surprise fixed forever on the faces of his victims, for Lady Maltomass was, from the waist down, blood coral. He glimpsed the frozen crease between her legs and cried out.
Garone appeared suddenly at his side, shouting, “Treachery.” Toler turned toward his servant just as Mamresh, bearing a smile, appeared and pulled back the hood of his tulpa’s robe. The swordsman glimpsed his own face with yellow eyes in the instant before the thought-form went out like a candle. He buckled inside from the sudden loss of Garone. Then, from out of the dark, he was punched in the face.
Toler came to on the floor, gasping as if he’d been under water. Greppen was there, helping him off the floor. Once Toler had regained his footing and clarity, he turned back to the bed.
“Imagine,” said Lady Maltomass, “your organ of desire transformed into a fossil.”
Toler was speechless.
“Some years ago, my father took me to the market at Camiar. He’d been working on the translation of the spell upon your sword, and he’d heard that you frequented a seller there who dispensed drams of liquor. He wanted to present you with what he’d discovered from the ancients about the sword’s script. Just as we arrived at the market, a fight broke out between five swordsmen and yourself. You defeated them, but in the melee you struck a young woman with an errant thrust and she was turned to coral.”
“Impossible,” he shouted.
“You’re an arrogant fool, Ismet Toler. The young woman was me. My father brought me back here a statue, and prepared the five herbs from his research into an elixir. He poured it down my hard throat, and because it was made of only half the ingredients of the cure, only half of me returned.”
Greppen tapped Toler upon the hip, and, when the swordsman looked down, handed him The Coral Heart.
“Now you face my tulpa,” said the Lady.
Toler heard Mamresh approaching and drew the sword, dropping the sheath upon the bed. He ducked and sidled across the floor, the weapon constantly moving. He turned suddenly and was struck twice in the face and once in the chest. He stumbled, but didn’t go down. She moved on him again, but this time, he saw her vague outline and sliced at her torso. The blade passed right through her and she kicked him in the balls. He doubled over and went down again.
“Get up, snake,” called Lady Maltomass from the bed.
“Please, rise, Ismet Toler,” said Greppen, now standing before him.
He lifted himself off the floor and resumed a defensive crouch. He kept the blade in motion, but his hands were shaking. Mamresh attacked. Her hard knuckles seemed to be everywhere at once. No matter how many times Toler swung The Coral Heart, it made no difference.
After another pass, Mamresh had him staggered and reeling from side to side. Blood was running from his nose and mouth.
“I’ve just given her leave to beat you to death,” said Lady Maltomass.
The vague outline of a muscled arm swept out of the air, and Toler slid beneath it, turned, and made the most exquisite cut to the ghostly figure’s spine. The blade didn’t even slow in its arc.
She closed his left eye and splintered his shin with a kick. Toler was on the verge of panic when he saw Greppen standing in the corner, tiny fists raised in the air, urging Mamresh to the kill. The tulpa came from the left this time. The swordsman had learned the sound of her breathing. Before she could strike, he tucked his head in and rolled into the corner where Greppen stood. He could hear her right behind him.
He reached out with his free hand and grabbed the toad man by the ankle. Then, as Toler rose, he lifted the blade, and with unerring precision, gave a deft slice to the Councilor’s neck. He turned quickly, and Greppen’s blood sprayed forth in a great geyser. It washed over Mamresh, and she became visible to him as she threw a punch at his left eye. He moved gracefully to the side, tossing Greppen’s now coral body at her. It passed through her face, briefly blocking her view of him. Toler calmly sought a spot where the blood revealed his assassin and then lunged, sending the blade there.
Mamresh gasped, and her visible face contorted in terror as she crackled into blood coral. He turned back to the bed, and the Lady was still. He now could ascertain the color of her eyes and they were a deep red. He’d made her mind coral in the act of defeating her tulpa. He dropped the sword and lay down beside her. Pulling her to him, he tried to kiss her, but her teeth were shut and a slow stream of drool issued from the corner of her mouth.
Toler discovered Nod gutted and decapitated in a heap upon the stable floor. After that, he spared no one, but worked his way down every hall and through the gardens, killing everything that moved. It was after midnight when he left the palace in the flying chair and disappeared into the western mountains.
People wondered what had happened to The Coral Heart. Some said he’d died of frostbite, some, of fever. Others believed he’d finally been careless and turned himself into a statue. Seven long years passed and the violence of the world had been diminished by half. Then, in the winter of the Year of Ice, a post rider galloped into Camiar and told the people that he’d seen a half-dozen bandits turned to coral on the road from Totenhas.
Path of the Dragon
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN
A Queen at Sea
Across the still blue water came the slow steady beat of drums, and the soft swish of oars from the galleys. The great cog groaned in their wake, the heavy lines stretched taut between. Balerion’s sails hung limp, drooping forlorn from the masts. Yet even so, as she stood upon the forecastle watching her dragons chase each other across a cloudless blue sky, Daenerys Targaryen was as happy as she could ever remember being.
Her Dothraki called the sea the poison water, distrusting any liquid that their horses could not drink. On the day the three ships had lifted anchor at Qarth, you would have thought they were sailing to hell instead of Pentos. Her brave young bloodriders had stared off at the dwindling coastline with huge white eyes, each of the three determined to show no fear before the other two, while her handmaids Irri and Jhiqui clutched the rail desperately and retched over the side at every little swell. The rest of Dany’s tiny khalasar remained below decks, preferring the company of their nervous horses to the terrifying landless world about the ships. When a sudden squall had enveloped them six days into the voyage, she heard them through the hatches; the horses kicking and screaming, the riders praying in thin quavery voices each time Balerion heaved or swayed.
No squall could frighten Dany, though. Daenerys Stormborn, she was called, for she had come howling into the world on distant Dragonstone as the greatest storm in the memory of Westeros howled outside, a storm so fierce that it ripped gargoyles from the castle walls and smashed her father’s fleet to kindling.
The narrow sea was often stormy, and Dany had crossed it half a hundred times as a girl, running from one Free City to the next half a step ahead of the Usurper’s hired knives. She loved the sea. She liked the sharp salty smell of sea air, and the vastness of limitless empty horizons bounded only by a vault of azure sky above. It made her feel very small, but free as well. She liked the dolphins that sometimes swam along beside Balerion, slicing through the waves like silvery spears, and the flying fish they glimpsed now and again. She even liked the sailors, with all their songs and stories. Once on a voyage to Braavos, as she’d watched the crew wrestle down a great green sail in a rising gale, she had even thought how fine it would be to be a sailor. But when she told her brother, Viserys had twisted her hair until she cried. “You are blood of the dragon,” he had screamed at her. “A dragon, not some smelly fish.”
He was a fool about that, and so much else, Dany thought. If he had been wiser and more patient, it would be him sailing west to take the throne that was his by rights. Viserys had been stupid and vicious, she had come to realize, and yet sometimes she missed him all the same. Not the cruel weak man he had become, by the end, but the brother who had once read to her and sometimes let her creep into his bed at night, the boy who used to tell her tales of the Seven Kingdoms, and talk of how much better their lives would be when he became a king.
The captain appeared at her elbow. “Would that this Balerion could soar as her namesake did, Your
Grace,” he said politely, in bastard Valyrian heavily flavored with accent of Pentos. “Then we should not need to row, nor tow, nor pray for wind. Is it not so?”
“It is so, Captain,” she answered with a smile, pleased to have won the man over. Captain Groleo was an old Pentoshi like his master, Illyrio Mopatis, and he had been nervous as a maiden about carrying three dragons on his ship. Half a hundred buckets of seawater still hung from the gunwales, in case of fires. At first Groleo had wanted the dragons caged and Dany had consented to put his fears at ease, but their misery was so palpable that she soon changed her mind and insisted they be freed.
Even Captain Groleo was glad of that, now. There had been one small fire, easily extinguished; against that, Balerion suddenly seemed to have far fewer rats than she’d had before, when she sailed under the name Saduleon. And her crew, once as fearful as they were curious, had begun to take a queer fierce pride in “their” dragons. Every man of them, from captain to cook’s boy, loved to watch the three fly...though none so much as Dany.
They are my children, she told herself, and if the maegi spoke truly, they are the only children I am ever like to have.
Viserion’s scales were the color of fresh cream, his horns, wing bones, and spinal crest a dark gold that flashed bright as metal in the sun. Rhaegal was made of the green of summer and the bronze of fall. They soared above the ships in wide circles, higher and higher, each trying to climb above the other.
Dragons always preferred to attack from above, Dany had learned. Should either get between the other and the sun, he would fold his wings and dive screaming, and they would tumble from the sky locked together in a tangled scaly ball, jaws snapping and tails lashing. The first time they had done it, she feared that they meant to kill each other, but it was only sport. No sooner would they splash into the sea than they would break apart and rise again, shrieking and hissing, the salt water steaming off them as their wings clawed at the air. Drogon was aloft as well, though not in sight; he would be miles ahead, or miles behind, hunting.
The Sword & Sorcery Anthology Page 46
