DragonThrone02 The Empire of the Stars

by Alison Baird

  She had a long soak and washed her hair. Then she toweled herself dry, put on the kimono, and had her meal. She must wait for night to fall, and the Loänei to emerge.

  THE BALLROOM WAS A VERY DIFFERENT place when it was occupied: alive, filled with light and color and sound. Ailia hesitated as she stood in the doorway, looking at the dancers spinning to swift-paced music, the couples entwined on the cushioned divans and standing behind huge potted ferns. The women had elaborately dressed hair, great curls and rolls piled high upon their heads, and voluminous flowing gowns. Whenever they moved, jewels winked slyly in the depths of their hair or glittered on their clothing. Flowers were everywhere—bursting from slender vases, twined about the candelabra, scattered across the refreshment table. A fountain of crystal had been set up in the middle of the room, a lantern at its center illuminating the droplets that showered around it. The scene looked deceptively pleasant and even familiar: it might have been any of the state occasions she had attended as princess of Arainia. No doubt the entertainment had been devised with just that goal in mind, to put her at her ease—and off her guard. She must not succumb to those designs. This was no light and pleasing diversion, but an encounter fraught with danger, orchestrated by a powerful and capricious adversary.

  She looked about her warily, but could not see Mandrake anywhere.

  She entered the room, holding her head high so as not to betray her unease. She had no diadem to wear, but she had bound the braids of her hair in a coronet about her head as a reminder of her rank. Still, she did not quite like the way the other revelers looked at her as she passed them.

  “Good evening,” said a voice in her ear as she turned to inspect the fountain. She jumped violently, to her chagrin, and spun to face the speaker. Mandrake was splendidly attired in a doublet of black velvet, dark leggings, and boots. He wore no crown tonight, his mass of tawny hair falling freely to his shoulders. A medallion hung upon his breast: a dragon of red enamel, rampant within a circle of gold. The emblem of Morlyn, the Dragon Prince. Perhaps it was the very pendant he had worn at court in Mera, five centuries ago . . .

  “Well, what do you think?” he inquired politely, waving a hand at the room.

  “It’s—splendid,” she replied, regaining her composure. She eyed the elaborate floral displays, the cascades of many-colored blooms that gave the grand chamber the look of an arbor. “You have gone to a great deal of effort.”

  “The occasion warrants it,” Mandrake said. He offered his black velvet arm. “This ball is in your honor, did you know? Come, Princess,” he reproved as she made no move to approach him, “can it be that you still don’t trust me? You have been under my roof for a night and a day and I have done you no harm. But perhaps you would rather be back in your court, with dozens of enamored suitors attending you and writing you bad poetry.”

  “I have no suitors,” she said, taking his arm with some reluctance.

  “No?” he raised an eyebrow, and she realized he knew perfectly well that she had none.

  She glanced away. “Who is that man with the long black hair, the one who first brought me to you? Why does he glare at you so?”

  “That is Erron Komora. He glares because he hates me,” said Mandrake. “I killed his grandfather, the former Great Dragon.” He did not speak boastfully, but with a cool indifference that was somehow more appalling.

  “So he wants to avenge him,” Ailia said.

  “Avenge? Not at all. He was hoping to kill the old man himself, as soon as his powers were strong enough. His father had already tried and failed—with fatal results. Erron’s powers are weak, but he knew the Great Dragon would one day become too old and feeble to fight. Then he would have an easy kill—and the throne would be his for the taking. But I beat him to it, and for that he cannot forgive me. I suppose I should eliminate him,” added the prince without so much as glancing at his rival, “but I don’t wish to alienate the Loänei too much at first. He bears watching, though. He may not have great powers, but he has a nasty cunning mind.”

  “But that is horrible!” Ailia exclaimed. “How can you live with such people?”

  “You’re sounding more like Ana all the time,” he said with disapproval. Then he swung around sharply. Everywhere in the hall heads turned away, and a buzz of hastily improvised conversation arose. “What a prying, inquisitive lot they are,” he said without rancor. “What are you smiling at, Princess? No—don’t stop. It’s a pleasure for once to see a smile that has no malice or mockery in it. Shall we find a more private place to talk?”

  He offered his arm again and she allowed him to lead her out of the room and down the corridor. He stopped in front of a closed door and pushed it open. “Here,” he said. “We can talk in here.”

  Ailia looked around the room curiously as she entered: it looked almost like a museum, full of peculiar objects.

  “My private collection of curiosities,” he told her. “I gathered some of them as a dragon. Stole, you would say, though the men I stole from were thieves too: robber barons and tyrant kings. Even as a child I always kept a hoard of shiny objects about me—I didn’t know why then, of course. I have always surrounded myself with beautiful things.” He was looking at her as he spoke. “It’s good to see you wearing a color for once, instead of that everlasting white. Don’t you ever get tired of it?” He gestured at the rose garden.

  Ailia was more interested in examining the objects. She recognized a Kaanish vase, a Shurkanese hanging, an Elei bard-harp. There was a model of a man’s head made apparently of brass, atop a pedestal of the same material. The jaw, she noticed, was hinged as though it were designed to move.

  “It is a kind of automaton called a Cogitator,” Mandrake said in answer to her unspoken query. “If you ask it a question it will compute an answer, and respond.”

  “The twelfth king of Shurkana had a brazen head like this. A gift from the Elei, or so the story went.”

  “This is the same one.”

  “However did you come by it?” she asked, fascinated in spite of herself.

  “That is a story I must tell you, one of these days.”

  Ailia turned to a glass aquarium containing water, some odd-looking aquatic plants, and—“Good Heavens! Whatever is it?” she exclaimed. The creature was like an eel, a silvery ribbon-shaped creature, but it had several round dark eyes spaced along the length of its body, and no discernible head.

  “I don’t know: I found it in a world that lies outside Talmirennia.”

  “You’ve traveled beyond the Empire?” she asked, not knowing whether to believe him or not.

  “I have. Ah, the things I could show you! You, who have lived all your life on Mera and Arainia! It is as though you had spent all your life in a couple of backwoods villages, never going outside, never seeing the world with its forests, mountains, oceans, and cities! There are things you have not even dreamt of!”

  She recalled her early days on the Island, her longing to see all that could be seen.

  “I could show you great nebulae and pulsating stars. I could take you to a planet where trees sprout from the ground in the morning, grow tall and bear fruit at noon, and die by nightfall. Or show you a world that has two atmospheres: one thick with vapor that covers all the lower regions of the planet’s surface, while the air of the upper layer into which its highlands project is clear and rare. Some people live on these lofty lands, soaring in flying vessels over the Cloud Sea that separates them from one another as an ocean separates continents. The rest live beneath the gray canopy, never seeing the highland dwellers unless one of their ships crashes into the lower regions. And those that dwell in the upper realms cannot breathe the air of the lower; they stifle in it, as if drowning in water. No tales of the high lands come down to the people under the Cloud Sea,” Mandrake said.

  “And then there are Archons. They built great cities, whose ruins still lie on far-flung worlds. I could take you to a frozen world whose cities are made not of stone, but ice quarried from glacial fiel
ds. Lamps of many-colored venudor still stand in the icy chambers within, and their light shines through the cold walls as if through thick clouded glass, so that the cities glow in the night. There are castles of ice, bridges of ice, towers and monuments and statues of ice in the shapes of strange beasts and beings. But no trace remains of their makers.”

  “Auron says they wore many forms on many different worlds. To his ancestors they appeared as dragons.”

  “That is true. What their own, true shape was no one knows: they never revealed it, and they did not bury their dead in tombs as humans do.”

  “Have you ever found anything that suggested what they were truly like?” she asked, curious.

  “Not yet. On one small and lonely world I found remains I thought might be those of Archons: there were vast stone sarcophagi there with Elensi inscriptions, and inside lay huge skeletons, twice as tall as any human being. But I learned from the inscriptions that these were merely humans who had settled the planet in ancient times, developing huge bodies because of the low gravity.”

  “Giants—real giants.” Ailia suddenly thrilled with the desire to see, to know. “So you haven’t just been hiding all these years, but exploring, too.”

  He threw her a sharp look. “My dear Princess, I have had to hide all my life! My mother had to go into hiding to bear me, for fear the Loänan would kill her to prevent it.”

  “Oh, no! They wouldn’t.”

  “Probably not, but she was afraid they would. And they would have taken me from her, I have no doubt: found a way to isolate me and confine my powers. Some of the Nemerei in Trynisia even wanted me dead. Ana wouldn’t have it, but I was not allowed to go free either.”

  “And then came Andarion’s court.”

  “My father . . .” Mandrake looked pensive. “He was terrified of me, and felt guilty for having loved my late unlamented mother. We never became close, though I tried hard enough to please him: all my greatest deeds were done for him, but to no avail. I had to call him ‘sire’ like everyone else—but since that could also mean ‘father’ I didn’t mind so much.” Mandrake paused, and his face grew closed, as though he had revealed more than he had intended.

  It was a story Ailia had known for nearly all her life. At last she had a chance to know more of it, the facts the storytellers had not known. “Then why did you turn on him?”

  “I never turned on my father! I truly didn’t know what was happening to me—I had horrible dreams and sometimes thought I was going mad. But I had no idea that my moods were affecting the weather and the land. My Loänan powers didn’t start to emerge until years later. Then the wind and clouds and rivers began to be disturbed by the energies I was unconsciously releasing. I had nightmares of being a dragon, of terrorizing the countryside. At least I thought then that they were nightmares: I didn’t know that the images I recalled on waking each morning were actually memories, that in my sleep I was really leaving the castle, really becoming a dragon. I was two creatures in one, the dragon giving shape to my deepest fears, but I didn’t know I was the rampaging monster from my dreams. When I was told that the attacks in those dreams really had occurred, I assumed I must somehow have developed a link to a rogue dragon’s mind.”

  Ailia listened in fascination. There was conviction in his voice: she was sure he was telling the truth, or at least his view of it, rather than an outright lie.

  “Eliana learned of what was happening, and she realized that my mother’s talent had emerged in me. When Brannar Andarion heard, he thought I was doing it deliberately,” Mandrake continued. “He had always feared me and was glad, I think, of an excuse to ride against me—destroy me at last. After the famous fight with Andarion and Ingard in the cave, I must have unconsciously assumed the dragon’s form when I fell wounded into the water. A dragon can hold its breath for nearly an hour, long enough for my father to believe me drowned. When I came to myself again, all I knew was that I was lying on the shore of the subterranean lake, with a bleeding wound in my neck. It was deep but not mortal, and I staggered up through the cellars to the main floor of the castle, only to find it had all been laid waste, my loyal men killed. I found my way to the abandoned dispensary, where I bound up my injury, but I was afraid to leave the confines of the fortress and lived alone in its desolate ruin for weeks. It was my Zimbouran childhood all over again—but worse, for this time my attackers were those I hoped had some regard for me.

  “As soon as I could, I made my way to an ethereal portal—there were a few left in Maurainia, and though all were closed I had learned the art of opening them—and I fled the world of Mera.”

  “But you came back,” she said.

  “Yes—many years later. I watched Liamar fall and the Dark Age begin. I returned to Mera only occasionally after that, to keep an eye on western scholarship—the legends of Trynisia particularly. As a dragon I built up hoards in other worlds, and I used riches from these whenever I needed wealth in Mera. Each time I visited I adopted a slightly different appearance, a new persona. I was always very careful to alter and age myself with glaumerie as time passed.”

  “I seem to recall,” said Ailia thoughtfully, “a tale of a Marakite noble, a Lord Draco, who never aged. He vanished from his castle one day, only to be glimpsed again sixty years later by a woman who had once seen him when she was a little girl. The lord hadn’t aged a day, the woman declared. A rumor arose that Draco was an alchemist who had discovered the elixir of eternal youth.”

  “Well, perhaps I have been careless on occasion,” Mandrake admitted.

  “And of course there was the Academy ghost—”

  “Ah, but that was different! Ghosts are expected to hang about for centuries. Gullible people believed I was a specter and others dismissed my existence. Until Eliana discovered me lurking there in the ruins of my old home, no one in Mera knew that I still lived. When it became clear that she bore me no malice, and believed my account of what had occurred in Maurainia long ago, I rejoiced that I had one less enemy to fear.”

  “And then—I came.”

  “Yes. The priests who raised me used to terrify me with tales about the great witch-queen who would one day seek to destroy me. They believed my mother was a demon of some kind, and they told me that as the child of a demon I would be hateful to you, that you would want me dead. You figured prominently in my childhood nightmares.”

  “How dreadful! I am sorry.”

  “And you have been told similar lies about me, I am sure. My childish fears were abandoned in time, but I knew you were a creation of the Archons. How I came to hate you! Your birth was eagerly anticipated and celebrated—you were showered with gifts and love. I decided to steal you away from those who meant to mold your life—even as Ana had taken me from the Valdur coven and freed me from their schemes. And that was when I met Syndra, who was of like mind.

  So Syndra had turned traitor all those years ago! “Go on,” said Ailia.

  “Your mother must have anticipated our plot—her Archon vision was always keen! She fled with the aid of a star-ship, not wanting to endanger her child any longer. I don’t know what became of her, Princess: her body was never found. Neither was yours, so I assumed that you both had drowned. But I was never easy in my mind about it.”

  “So when you heard of Lorelyn—”

  “Naturally, I thought she was you. The fact that Ana also seemed to believe she was the Tryna Lia helped to convince me. I led your little band to the temple and let you discover the empty sanctum. If the Zimbourans caught you, they would learn from you that the Stone was gone. All the cosmos seemed to be converging on the summit of Elendor that day: an Imperial dragon had also arrived, looking, as I suspected, for the Tryna Lia—he made the mistake of falling asleep while guarding the closed Gate, and I chained him as he slept. Then those two meddling friends of yours found me while I was resting on my hoard and seized the sword of my father and used it against me. But after all that they ran off with nothing but an empty box, so I did not pursue them.


  “I carried Lorelyn away to Eldimia, knowing Ana must soon recover from her swoon and make use of Auron or the Guardians to follow us with the Stone. I had decided that I would let her think Lorelyn was the true princess, and then I would be safe forever. But I never suspected that you were the One—not until you were in your place of power at Halmirion, and then it was too late. So: that is my confession.”

  Ailia nodded in understanding. How much of it was true she could not know, but clearly he had struggled with his parenthood and destiny as she had with hers. And he had spared her life when he could have killed her.

  In the great hall the music had started up again. Mandrake suddenly turned and took her hand. “But this is gloomy talk: I’m sure you have had enough of it. I meant to make you feel welcome here. Did you want to dance?”

  She followed him back down the hall and into the ballroom. Dancing here was very strange, Ailia thought. There were no sets, no intricate figures: people danced in isolated couples strewn about the room, spinning slowly like double stars, paying no heed to the other dancers save to avoid colliding with them. They danced with their arms about each other in an embrace: to Ailia this looked almost indecent. But she could not refuse. Gingerly she placed her hands on Mandrake’s shoulders, as the other ladies were doing. He put his about her waist: she could feel them trembling with suppressed mirth. “I was forgetting,” he murmured, his face close to hers. “You don’t dance this way in Arainia.”