The Dragon's Egg

by Pauline M. Ross

  I’ve seen a few towers in my time – tall ones, curvy ones, some with great domed roofs – but I’d never seen anything like the towers of Minaar. They were stacked up higgledy-piggledy like a child’s wooden blocks, narrowing or bulging seemingly at random, leaning together or twisting apart, with slender bridges linking them. And they stretched far, far into the sky. Even from many marks away, their great height was obvious.

  By the time we arrived, the sky was dark, but Minaar was filled with light. As the sky ship slowed, the High Road ran through the bowels of the city, with great walls all round us. But the walls were full of windows so that we were surrounded by the twinkling of lamps like a thousand stars, below us and far above us. It was like entering a cavern filled with fireflies, so large that the height of the roof can’t even be guessed at.

  We clattered into the sky ship port, to be greeted by a more normal array of lights along one wall, and a line of servants to help us alight and retrieve our boxes before the carriage moved on and round the great wheel and back out into the darkness again. I was stiff and tired and, I realised, hungry. We’d had no proper food all day. What I wouldn’t give for a decent slab of meat, or a solid stew filled with tasty root vegetables, with perhaps a mug of ale. A smiling tavern girl would be nice, too, but I supposed there was no chance of that.

  Several other groups of passengers alighted at the same time, so for a while there was a great milling about as the various groups sorted themselves out. Hanni and Zarin went off to find out about accommodation. There were benches set into the wall, so Drusinaar and I sat there, while the servants loaded our boxes onto a cart and then waited patiently for instructions.

  “We can stay here for tonight,” Hanni said when she returned. “Then tomorrow we will find an inn. The Director has given me some suggestions. Come along.”

  It was up, of course. The city was very much upside down. Even though the sky ships’ High Road was several stories above the ground, Minaar’s towers were far higher than that. There was a lifting device, and we rose an unknown number of floors, swaying slightly, with the single lamp casting deep shadows in the corners. Zarin had the jitters again, shaking a little, his mouth compressed into a thin line.

  The servants silently wheeled their cart down long corridors lit only by night lamps. We passed a great many doors, most closed and silent, but from one or two I heard voices, the chink of knife on plate and a faint smell of ale. The door of one room stood open, and many male voices drifted out, along with the unmistakable rattle of bones being tossed.

  In an instant I was twelve again, lurking outside the secret back rooms and cellars where the gambling went on, or loitering in murky alleys, keeping watch for the guards, and running out to fetch ale for the players. By fifteen, I had my own table, and played in the drawing rooms of wealthy folk, too rich and important to be bothered by the authorities.

  Nostalgia washed over me like the tide. If I could return to that life, the simplicity of bones and stones and coins, the comradeship of shared games, the endless possibilities of the next throw, I would have done it in a heartbeat. I still longed for the excitement of it. At fifteen, it had seemed to me that the world was a fruit ripe for plucking. I might look like just another gambler, but I had my secret ability and I was careful… there were no limits to how far I could ride. One day, I would be rich, and untouchable, and people would bow to me on the street.

  All gone, now. Long gone, and nothing I’d seen and done since had quite compared to the thrill of those days.

  The servants threw open a door and ushered us inside. It was small, fitted with narrow bunk beds like a barracks, but the floor was clean, and there were folded blankets on each bed. Twelve beds, room for half a troop.

  “Any chance of food?” I asked the servants, but they stared at me blankly, then carried on unloading our boxes from the cart.

  “They speak no Low Mesanthian,” Hanni said. “Or High Mesanthian, either.”

  “How’s that? I thought everyone on the coast knew one or other of those. What do they speak, then?”

  “The language of West Minaar is Minaarese,” Drusinaar said, “an inflected language unrelated to any other extant language of the northern coast. It is most closely related to Archaic Murthian. East Minaar, by contrast, speaks High and Low Mesanthian exclusively.”

  “Fine. And we’re in West Minaar, presumably. So is Minaarese one of your languages, Drusinaar?”

  “No.”

  “None of us speaks it,” Hanni said. “There was an interpreter at the Caravan Station.”

  “Oh, for—! So how do we get some food, then?”

  “There is no food here. You should have eaten more as we travelled.”

  “That fiddly stuff? It wasn’t real food,” I muttered.

  Hanni gave me a little smile. “Sleep, Garrett. Tomorrow we will go somewhere more comfortable.”

  Zarin was already curled up on one of the beds, blankets pulled around him. He looked pale and tired, like an old man. I teased him about his age, but he wasn’t that old. In his fifties, I guessed, and I’d seen men of that age fitter than me. But Zarin was only really happy with his books, sitting all day at a desk, never moving, and any exertion tired him. And now he’d been faced with raiders and slavers and imprisonment, not to mention the constant travelling – it had to be difficult for him.

  Drusinaar and Hanni both chose beds and settled down to sleep. Nobody got undressed. I took my boots off, wrapped myself in a blanket and lay still. Then I waited. Zarin was easy enough – after a while, he began to snore softly. The two women were much more difficult. I just couldn’t tell if they were asleep or not. They didn’t move, but that didn’t mean much.

  Eventually I couldn’t wait any longer. I slid out of bed, and tiptoed to the door. No one stirred. It was odd how guilty I felt leaving them, even though I knew they were perfectly safe. Too much bodyguard training, I suppose.

  The door opened without a sound. I left it ajar, with one boot just inside it to mark it, since all the doors were identical. On bare feet, I crept into the corridor. The nightlamps marched in a long line, leading me back the way we’d come.

  I heard the voices from some distance away, the constant masculine murmur, then one voice alone and a burst of laughter. Gods, how I wanted to be part of it! And yet, I stood outside that door, uncertain and afraid. Now that I was there, I knew they were not speaking any language I understood. And there was quite a crowd – more than twelve of them. I was unarmed and almost defenceless.

  But not quite. Their minds – their eyes – were open to me. With crowds, it can be difficult to pick out just one mind to jump into, but these men were sitting around, not moving about, and I was just the other side of the wall. I chose one mind at random, and then I was there in the room.

  Flats, held in pudgy hands. No table, just a square of cloth on the floor, with six – no, seven men squatting round it. Standing behind them, a ring of onlookers, holding flasks or eating cheese or strips of meat. My mouth watered watching them. Somewhere else in the room, another group huddled on the floor. Throwing bones, most likely. They seemed cheerful enough, all young but not fit, so not guards or soldiers. I couldn’t see any weapons, although they could easily have knives tucked away somewhere. And friendly, laughing and joking together.

  I hesitated for a few heartbeats, but gambling was in my blood. Taking a risk was never something I agonised over too deeply.

  Pushing the door further open, I walked in. I held my hands slightly away from my body, so they could see I was unarmed. I hoped my bare feet looked unthreatening, too.

  “Evening,” I said, with my friendliest smile. “Mind if I watch for a bit?” Then I repeated it in High Mesanthian.

  The watchers exchanged glances, the smiles slipping slightly. The players looked up briefly, then turned straight back to the game. I approved of that. No good player allows himself to be distracted that easily.

  There is a moment in such situations, a point of highest risk,
just after you walk into a group like that. It only needs one to challenge, then the rest will take it up and the game is lost. Then you just have to hope they throw you out gently, and not on the point of a sword.

  But if you don’t hesitate, don’t look nervous, don’t sidle, if you walk in there with confidence, as if you have every right to be there, then as often as not they take you at your own evaluation. So I found myself a spot against the wall and stood, watching the play. And after a moment or two, they lost interest in me and turned their attention back to the game.

  Of course, I could see all the play, every flat that any of them held, what they drew from the various piles, what they discarded. It was a simple enough game. The flats each had a picture on – a dragon, a bird, a fish, a tree. There was a picking up and discarding phase, then a matching phase and finally a playing phase. They were playing for small coins, little brown things smaller than a fingernail. There was no gambling that I could see, it was just straightforward play for money. Not so much chance to win big, but still, a skilled player could make good money that way.

  I got the idea of it pretty quickly. One of them, a big, swarthy man, was clearly making more money than the others, so I watched what he did, and worked out a strategy. Then I crouched down behind a smaller man, with blond hair and a wispy beard, who was losing a lot of coins. Now that I knew the way of it, I could see what he was doing wrong. He was just about to discard two flats when I tapped him on the shoulder, and pointed to a different two.

  He could have got mad at me, but instead he beamed in delight and made the play I’d suggested. Before his next play, he actually turned round, a questioning look on his face. Within three rounds, I was more or less playing for him. Someone passed me a flask of some pleasantly sweet ale. Then a hunk of bread stuffed with meat. And then, astonishingly, a handful of coins and a gesture to sit and play.

  So I did. We couldn’t exchange a single word, but we had a common language in our pleasure in the game. I found more genuine fellowship among those men than I’d had for years. I went back to my bed a little after dawn with both belly and pocket comfortably full.

  23: The Moon of Wet Harvests (Zarin)

  Zarin was irritated beyond endurance by Garrett. The man had vanished in the middle of night, on the Gods alone knew what enterprise, and now here he was, sound asleep and snoring fit to wake all the Seven Demons.

  He shook Garrett rather more roughly than was strictly necessary. “Wake up, will you? It is time to go. Someone will be here to carry our boxes at any moment.”

  Garrett grunted, rolled over and went back to sleep.

  “Garrett!” Zarin yelled in his ear.

  “Wha…?” He was out of bed in one swift movement, scrabbling for something – his missing sword, perhaps. Old habits were hard to break. “Where’s the fire? Are the Demons of the Ninth Vortex about to descend on us?”

  Zarin tutted and rolled his eyes. “Oh, for—! It is time you were awake. Where did you get to, anyway? I woke in the night to find you gone.”

  “Just a stroll down the corridor.” He grinned mockingly.

  Zarin did not believe a word of it. But just then, the servants arrived and loaded their boxes onto a cart, and they began the long descent to ground level.

  He had slept badly, hunger and thirst gnawing at his belly like rodents. Now he was exhausted. Why had he ever agreed to this journey? It had been uncomfortable and difficult from the start, and had descended to levels of torture he’d hoped never to encounter outside the pages of books. The arduous life aboard ship, the capture by raiders, the slave ship, the Drakk’alonan prison… even Hanni and her compatriots, who had never hurt them and seemed to be friendly, yet he felt overwhelmed. He was drained and helpless, wrung out like a washed sheet and hung to dry, to be tossed about by every puff of breeze. He longed for something familiar, or at least to stop moving for a while.

  The lifting device deposited them in a cavernous room, bare and echoing, filled with people and laden carts and shouting. Men and women alike wore the same wide trousers, cut rather short, under a loose tunic, all in sombre colours. Hair was neatly plaited. Dull attire for a dull city.

  Fortunately for Zarin’s sanity, they moved swiftly through, out into a street, although not like any street he had seen before. There were no horses, only hand-pulled carts or small carriages, large enough for one person to sit inside while runners pulled the contraption along with ropes. Towers stretched into the sky, connected by zig-zagging bridges, but at ground level the deep shade cast a chill. Far above, slivers of blue were visible, but no sunlight penetrated so far down.

  There was no time to look around, for the cart with their boxes set off at a fast pace, hauled by a boy so skinny, he looked as if a leaf would knock him over, and Zarin had to scamper to keep up. He was soon puffing like a blown horse.

  Garrett stopped and waited for him. “Do you want an arm to lean on, old man?”

  “I can… manage,” Zarin wheezed, but even so, he was glad when Garrett chose to walk alongside him. He chattered away, pointing out this and that, but not requiring any answer. Not that Zarin had breath to reply anyway.

  In this way, they made their way through the streets of West Minaar, emerging finally at a square large enough to admit sunshine to one corner. The light seemed so dazzling, Zarin had to shield his eyes with one hand.

  When he looked around, he saw nothing unusual. The same carriages and carts that clogged the streets, the same groups of people striding about purposefully, heads down, the same depressing dark clothes. Around three sides of the square, the same great buildings stretching endlessly upwards. The fourth side was a featureless wall many stories high. Yet it seemed that they had arrived, for their boxes were being unloaded from the cart and dumped on the ground. The cart emptied, the skinny boy raced off the way he had come.

  The four of them stood looking at each other.

  “Well,” Hanni said, uncertainly. “I think this is the right place. We have to find someone with a carriage for hire. But first, we have to find an interpreter. I will look around. You three stay with the boxes.”

  “Take Drusinaar with you,” Garrett said. “She has more languages than the rest of us put together.”

  “Very well. Come along, child.”

  Zarin sat on one of the boxes. Now that he was used to the intensity of the sunlight, he could see that there was more order to the square than he had supposed. The small carts were bringing travel boxes and bags, or taking them away. There were neat lines of larger wagons and carriages of various sizes. In some places, he could see queues of people waiting for something, but he could not say what.

  Garrett squatted down beside him. “How are you doing?”

  “All right.” Zarin’s lips twisted into a wry grin. “As well as can be expected, at my advanced age.”

  “You’re not so old. This journey’s taken a lot out of all of us. You must be hungry, but there’s nowhere here to get food. Not even a stall with drinks. I’m sorry.”

  Zarin shrugged. “Not your fault.”

  “No, but I should have known better. There was plenty of food yesterday. I should have kept some for emergencies. First rule of battle, make sure you have a good supply of victuals.”

  “Are we in battle?” Zarin asked mildly.

  “Well – it feels a bit that way, doesn’t it?” Garrett said, ruefully. “I like seeing new places, but I’m not sure that Hanni quite knows what she’s doing.”

  Zarin licked his lips. It was easier to snipe at Garrett and despise his ignorance, but there was a kind heart buried under that Godless exterior. “She is arranging transport across the causeway to East Minaar, I imagine.”

  “Causeway? You’ve been here before, then?”

  “No, but East and West Minaar are famous.”

  “Famous for what?”

  Zarin bit back an acid response. “East Minaar is famous for being the furthest point of expansion by the Akk’asharan Empire. The high walls were supposed to k
eep the Akk’asharans out, but no wall was high enough for that. West Minaar, however, was never conquered, so even though they were founded by the same people, they are very different in atmosphere. I shall be very glad when we cross the causeway.”

  “So why didn’t the Empire conquer West Minaar?”

  Zarin laughed. “There was nothing here that they wanted. West Minaar was built to provide a safe refuge for the rulers of East Minaar, in case it was conquered. But the Empire had no use for the ruling class. They had all the wealth and working population of East Minaar, so they left the rulers alone in their towers in West Minaar.”

  Garrett chuckled. “I’ve always said that the people at the top are useless. I guess the Empire agreed with me.”

  “Very true. The least necessary part of any society is its leadership. Hanni has been gone a long time. Do you think there is a problem?”

  “We’ll find out soon enough.” Garrett yawned widely. “All this journeying – it’s very wearing. You look worn out, old man, and I don’t feel exactly sprightly myself.”

  “That may be because you were up half the night, gallivanting about.”

  Garrett laughed. “That may have something to do with it.”

  Hanni came back, looking cross. With her was a tall man dressed in sombre black, and a dour face to match.

  “Well, this is very annoying,” she said. “I have three kinds of coin with me, but none of them will do, not even dragons. We cannot hire any type of conveyance, nor even obtain a seat on the public wagons, until I can get hold of the local money. There is a place which will change my coin, but it is some distance away – we are not quite sure how far.”

  “Four kertrin,” the interpreter said helpfully.

  “Quite. Although whether that is a measurement of time or distance – who knows? I may be gone for some time. But this gentleman will show me the way, and interpret for me.”