Dragonlinks

by Paul Collins

  Almeriy was a waystop village in the mountains. Terraced gardens on the nearby slopes provided vegetables, and alpine sheep and goats grazed wherever they could. No more than a few hundred people lived there, including two dozen archers and infantry attached to the customs fort. There were several inns, all brightly painted and decorated with carvings.

  ‘Ah, to sleep under a good, solid roof again,’ said Zimak. ‘It’s like being back in D’loom.’

  ‘But you slept under a canvas awning back in D’loom,’ Jelindel reminded him.

  ‘We need some rest from birds, ants and all else that has come to plague us today,’ Zimak said, ignoring her.

  ‘The mailshirt glows more brightly than ever before,’ said Daretor. ‘Whoever wears the link is growing more bold.’

  Zimak considered for a moment. ‘Might we double back and ambush him?’ he suggested.

  ‘Out in the wilderness he would know us for who we are,’ Daretor replied. ‘In a village we would be three out of hundreds, yet we could watch the road to the village in comfort. We stay in Almeriy tonight.’

  As they entered the village the dogs began barking and snarling, and an ancient parrot on a perch screeched and hurled abuse at them in several languages. They went into an inn named the Highland Dream, paid for rooms and ordered drinks. The people of the village were used to serving travellers, and most spoke Skeltian tolerably well.

  ‘The dogs are afeared of ye,’ said the vintner.

  ‘I prefer cats,’ Daretor replied laconically.

  ‘None o’ them ’round these parts,’ the vintner said. ‘The dogs ate ’em all.’ He chuckled and waddled off to fetch their order.

  ‘It explains the number of rats like him,’ said Zimak.

  ‘What is a weapon?’ asked Jelindel as they drank from their mugs and waited for the food to arrive.

  ‘What is a weapon?’ laughed Zimak. ‘What sort of a stupid question is that?’

  ‘So what is a weapon, then?’

  ‘Why, a knife, a sword, and, ah …’

  ‘They are weapons. What about a length of wood, or a rock? What about a warship: is it a weapon, or are the weapons the marines, the catapults and the bow-ram? Is the ship a weapon, or a platform of weapons?’

  ‘A weapon is what defeats your enemy,’ Daretor suggested, frowning with concentration.

  ‘Well then, what of the beautiful spy who seduces a general and learns the secrets that cause a war to be lost. Is she a weapon? What about a herd of elkenharts that are driven over the crops of an enemy, causing them to be starved into submission. Is the herd a weapon, too?’

  ‘The herd is like a stone or a length of wood,’ Zimak replied after considering more carefully. ‘They are not weapons as such, but they can be used as weapons. They require skill if they are to be used to proper effect, more skill than a sword I suppose.’

  ‘The links confer skills!’ Daretor exclaimed. ‘Skills to wield a sword or throw a knife … or to goad a hound into attacking your enemy!’

  Each of them looked from one to the other, eyes shining with the revelation.

  ‘Ants, birds, flies and dogs,’ said Jelindel. ‘Magical training can teach the control of them, but only under certain laws. I have read that a swarm of ants or a flock of birds can be rallied because they move together by nature. Even a pack of dogs can be controlled as one, but not if their combined weight exceeds that of the mage.’

  ‘And once over that weight?’ asked Zimak.

  ‘Only one animal at a time. One mage may control one elephant, one lion, one elkenhart, or even one dragon. Birds … I have not read how it applies to birds.’

  ‘Then the link that is making the mailshirt glow now is one that confers the control of animals,’ Daretor concluded.

  ‘Hie! This will be easy,’ said Zimak, rubbing his hands together.

  The food was plain but plentiful, and the fire was welcome after a day of walking in the cold mountain air. Daretor did not mind the cold, but Jelindel and Zimak had never known anything other than the subtropical heat of D’loom and were quite unhappy about it. Daretor paid two loafers in the taproom to keep a watch on the road for anyone arriving behind them, and they left the inn to take up their positions.

  When Daretor tried going outside, the village dogs went into a frenzy of barking and he quickly returned to the inn.

  ‘The linkrider is controlling those dogs from beyond the village,’ Daretor said sullenly, swatting at a mosquito.

  ‘He has to sleep sometime,’ said Zimak. ‘Perhaps then we can get some rest.’

  ‘That’s when we should attack him!’ said Daretor fiercely. ‘He is using stolen skills and deserves to die.’

  ‘Whatever, but we shall need a room for when we sleep,’ Zimak suggested. ‘I’ll get one.’

  ‘I want a separate room,’ insisted Jelindel.

  ‘What? That’s a high price to pay for vows of modesty,’ snapped Zimak.

  ‘Both of you snore,’ sneered Jelindel. ‘It’s been hard enough to sleep already, out on the trail. If I can’t get distance from you two I’ll not sleep at all.’

  ‘No! There are four bedframes in each room, and besides, we’re better protected if we’re together.’

  Jelindel stayed in the taproom when Daretor and Zimak went up to their room. The last of the drinkers finally left and the fire died down slowly. She gazed into the coals as she lay on one of the benches. She missed books, whether they were in the temple library, her father’s library, or the stalls of the marketplace. Because she had initially been discouraged from studying formally, unlike her brothers she had learned to memorise whatever she read that seemed interesting or important.

  She had rarely experimented with magic, even though she had read most of the major texts and quite a few of the minor ones as well.

  Dour, bad-tempered old Surreanten, her father’s house spellcaster, had regularly checked the rooms for traces of enchantment. Her brothers had been caned several times for charm-casting experiments, but for Jelindel the punishment would have been exile from the library.

  The untutored use of magic was dangerous. The life-force of one’s body was what powered the threads of unreality woven through the real world, and those threads had an enormous capacity to channel life-force. Her eldest brother once told her of a boy at the collegium who learned some words of enchantment and how to poise them, then spoke one to bind a dog in the cloisters. He had spoken it too loud and with an inflexion that made the coils far too powerful.

  The dog had been crushed by the blue coils and died instantly, but the coils still gripped its body as tightly as ever. The boy had collapsed, and did not survive a single hour. As he died the coils released the body of the dog, and although a mage tried to revive the boy as the life-force returned to glow about his body, the shock had been too great.

  Without magic, they were at the mercy of all the char-mvendors and mages who might be in their path, yet nobody would be willing to teach it to any of them. Annoyance flared in Jelindel: she would try anyway. Better to die fighting than cowering.

  Almost without thinking, Jelindel began the breathing exercises to enhance focus: in – count three, hold – count three, out – count three, hold – count three. After twenty cycles she stood up, crossed her hands over her collarbone and pushed out, left against right. There was a subtle, warm, charged feeling just below her ribs.

  She sat down on the bench again. There was a risk of novices fainting during their early experiments. What word to invoke? she wondered. Fearfully she closed her eyes.

  ‘Oculesquri,’ she said softly but distinctly.

  Surreanten had used that word to check the rooms of the mansion for charms and enchantments.

  Nothing happened. She tried again with different intonations and emphasis. Still nothing. Several more attempts did no better. She grew annoyed and she spoke the word loudly and with vehemence, phrasing the last four letters as a single syllable.

  Jelindel seemed to burst into nothingness, inco
nceivably remote nothingness. Stars gleamed brightly in the inky blackness. She groped for control, but grasped nothing. Through the icy terror that seized her, she thought, so this is what it is like to practise alone.

  The simple survey spell had separated her vision and control of her limbs from the rest of her body. Some frantic experiments quickly established that she could still speak and hear on her own plane. She could call for help, she realised with relief, but who could help? Her body would not starve, as long as people fed her, but that was hardly a comfort.

  The control that was lost to her limbs seemed to now allow her to move about in this unsettlingly strange para-plane. Her eyes let her see to move, while her sense of touch was redirected there as well. Jelindel tried to calm herself; panic will not save me, she said to herself over and over. In one direction the space around her was somehow slightly more viscous. Using incorporeal limbs she grasped at the resistance, then moved towards it. Her speed increased, then a shape began to resolve itself, a shape as big as the world, yet the shape of – a mailshirt!

  Jelindel was at once reassured. The mailshirt really did have properties other than those involving weapons. A war galley made a bow wave as it glided through the water, and dolphins were known to ride the bow waves of ships. The warship was built for fighting, not for the pleasure of dolphins, yet that did not matter to a dolphin. It was a good analogy, she thought. The mailshirt provided a reference for her, the wearer. Just as dolphins rode bow waves, perhaps she could ‘ride’ the aura of the mailshirt. That might not be the mailshirt’s real purpose, but she did not care.

  Jelindel moved forward again, and gradually closed with the mailshirt.

  The taproom solidified around her, and all was normal again. The glow from the hearth was dimmer, and she estimated that a quarter hour had passed. Anyone else would have thanked everything sacred that they were still alive and left it at that, but Jelindel was very persistent. She repeated the word more softly, and again fell into the star-studded void, and then struggled back from the blackness.

  Within the following hour she spoke the word thirty-five times and crawled back to the beacon of the mailshirt. It was as exhausting as a heavy afternoon of sparring with Zimak, but sheer excitement drove her on. At her thirty-sixth attempt she had the tone and inflexion balanced against the strength. Now Jelindel did not plunge very far, yet it seemed as if she were flying above a very strange landscape while other beings flew nearby. They were thin figures like people, yet with dragonfly wings. They cried out when she came near, then shouted questions and strings of what might have been names.

  As she flew lower the lights on the ground resolved themselves into things like villages lit by moon-lantern globes and small open forges. Something of her passing was noticed by those below.

  Tiny things like children scurried away. What might have been elders or warriors threw streamers of light and blazing globes of flame into the air, while others shouted names at the sky. Nothing had any effect upon her.

  She passed over darkened forests of black streamers, and above craggy peaks of what seemed to be a lacework of interlocking spirals. One serrated outcrop unfolded into something huge and winged. The dim outline of what might have been a dragon lumbered majestically into the air, flinging streamers of fire from its translucent, billowing wings as it fled among the mountains. Hanging above the peaks, Jelindel realised that she could travel up, down and sideways, but also … through. ‘Through’ was not quite the word that described what she did, but it was the only word that came close to what she found herself doing. She moved closer to the beacon of the mailshirt, yet not quite all the way between planes.

  She had read that there were weak points between worlds and planes, weak points that moved. Now she had proof of them. Unknown to Jelindel, a mage stood guard on the balcony of a tower in Hez’ar, then moved through. Jelindel saw only an oval with great streamers for wings, a large bird of light and shadow that flew through this para-plane where enchantment held a much stronger sway. She watched it fly, trailing it at a distance yet noticing that it was flying evasively. Obviously it saw her, too.

  Again the mage passed through. Unseen by Jelindel because he was back on the normal plane, he stepped onto the roof of a temple on the same city, but this time as a man. A priestess was waiting there for him. They cowered in each other’s arms for a moment as he told her about a presence that had followed him, then they ran for cover.

  Jelindel moved through and emerged closer to the mountains where she was staying, and closer to the mailshirt. Distance did not mean the same thing here. Distance was based on associations of magical domains and influences rather than physical separation, she concluded as she explored.

  Again she spoke a word, a variation on the one that was her present essence. The space around her blazed up into pinpoints of enchantment. She approached one bright light that seemed closest to her. The light was a view through to her plane, and she could see the interior of a darkened room from a perspective very close to the floor. There was moonlight filtering through the shutters of a window.

  She could see very well, and her head was moving rapidly as it scanned a bed that towered above her. She recognised the weapons that Zimak and Daretor carried. Her host was in the same room as them. The view was through the eyes of a rat, she surmised, yet its movements were purposeful and bold, not at all like those of a common rat. She could hear nothing but the drip of a leaking stopcock back in the taproom.

  Her host began to climb the bedpost, and was suddenly confronted by a foot as big as itself protruding from the blankets. It raised its head to bite.

  There was a shriek from upstairs and Jelindel returned to her body and opened her eyes at once. The voice had been Zimak’s, and he now followed up with curses in Skeltian, Baltorian and Hamarian interspersed with a lot of thumping and crashing. Zimak’s skill as a linguist was confined to picking up curses in other tongues, Jelindel thought as she smiled to herself.

  Now Jelindel heard the landlord banging on a door and demanding to know what was going on. There was a heated exchange about rats, refunds, and travellers bearing curses, then the tavern became quiet again.

  Jelindel sat back in wonder, stunned at her own success. She had been able to use a seeing word to merge with the eyes of a rat. A rat that was under some manner of enchantment, no less. The linkrider just had to be involved. Did the link confer the senses of an animal on a user? It made sense. One had to see what was in front of the animal to direct it, just as one needed to see one’s hand in order to write properly.

  As she thought about what she had just achieved Jelindel fed a couple more cuts of alpine ashwood to the coals. She stretched out on the bench again.

  She tried the seeing words several more times, but the other sparkles of light were opaque: they were all spells that did not involve vision. They were probably door spells, love potions and minor medical enchantments, nothing that an Adept 3 charmvendor could not manage. The late Fa’red had been an Adept 12 and the more recently late Thull had been ranked Adept 11. Jelindel knew that she would be struggling to rate Adept 1 … yet she had been able to use the seeing word without undue trouble. The mailshirt was her secret: without it she would still be detached in unthinkably remote realms while her body lay dying.

  Jelindel finally caught an image from another rat, or perhaps a mouse. It was on a bedpost, trying to see the face of a head lying on a pillow. It was not in the room that Daretor and Zimak were occupying.

  Perhaps the linkrider was searching for her, checking all the other rooms upstairs. He would be in for a long and futile search, she thought with satisfaction. Jelindel began to cast about to find the linkrider who was using the eyes of the rodent, but he was either too far away or very well cloaked.

  Returning to her own plane, she swung her legs to the floor and sat up, staring at the glowing coals in the grate. It was extremely quiet. Small towns were not like cities and there were no belltowers or criers to mark the passing of the night. Th
ere were not even singing drunks weaving their way home. Small towns closed early for the night and their people slept soundly.

  Jelindel stood up, then reeled with giddiness and quickly sat down again. The explorations in the paraplane had drained her more than she had realised. Again she stood up, but very slowly, and this time she shuffled to a window and pushed the shutters open.

  The alpine air was sharp, cool and fresh, and all three moons were in the cloudless sky. For many lingering minutes she stood there, feeling her body grow strong again. All the while the thought played through her mind that she had mastered the use of several dangerous words. Oddly enough, there were certain common features of intonation and emphasis, consonants on indrawn breaths and such. Perhaps they were common across other words as well.

  Thull had spoken the binding word loudly when panicked into snaring Zimak in the loft, and Jelindel remembered it well. With a foolishness that could only have been born of enthusiasm, Jelindel began searching for a target. One of the hunting dogs that had barked at them when they arrived loped into view across the street.

  ‘Vec-takine!’

  The dog collapsed with a yelp, ensnared in blue coils. Jelindel collapsed, too, as limp as a rag doll. She had either done something wrong, or done it too well. Each breath was a victory, and opening her eyes was out of the question. Nearly all of her life-force had poured out into the coils that now held the dog lying in the street.

  After perhaps ten minutes, and with a great effort, she managed to turn herself over.

  Daretor came creeping across the floor as she opened her eyes. ‘Jaelin!’ he gasped. ‘What’s wrong? Were you attacked?’

  ‘All right, I’m all right,’ she slurred, embarrassed by her ill-considered experiment. ‘Just … exhausted.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Just need sleep.’

  ‘Jaelin, I must have the mailshirt for an hour.’

  ‘Take it.’

  Jelindel was aware of Daretor removing the sheepskin, then the glowing mailshirt. If he takes off the quilting beneath he’ll really get a surprise, she thought, but the warrior just draped the sheepskin over her and left. Jelindel’s mind collapsed into the sound, pitch-black, dreamless sleep of someone recovering from a long fever.