A Dragon at Worlds' End (21 page)

After floating for a while, he kicked slowly toward the far shore, trying to keep an eye out for crocodiles, which infested some reaches of the river, but not others. It seemed that this was one of the latter.

It seemed to take a long time, but at last he staggered out of the water and onto a pebbled beach. The bank was lined with gnarled and twisted roots, and small trees hung overhead. He hauled himself up and crouched, listening carefully. You could usually hear large pujish approaching, even though they were very quiet for their size, but it was best to be absolutely sure.

Nothing stirred except insects. The coast seemed clear. He left the cover of the small trees and started up an open slope toward the higher ground. There was further forest there.

He was perhaps halfway across when there came a dismaying roar from the trees ahead. Relkin flattened himself to the ground. It was devoid of cover here, and a footrace to the river with a big pujish was out of the question; the pujish were much too fast.

There was a tremendous crunching of trees and undergrowth and a series of enormous roars and then a huge red-brown burst out of the forest. It was full-grown, bigger than any wyvern, bigger even than the mighty Purple Green of Hook Mountain, with a vast head filled with teeth like daggers. Relkin was both awed and terrified. Caymo had sent some bad dice Relkin's way in his time, but never anything quite this bad. Old Gongo was going to get a pretty chewed-up dragonboy when he came to take him to the halls of the dead.

But then the dice wobbled. There came another terrifying roar that made the ground shudder, and then the monster stepped forward with that curiously precise, almost mincing gait, which seemed incongruous in an animal this large. It stepped past Relkin, taking no notice at all of the small prone form on the ground.

Amazed to be alive, Relkin dared to peek up. The pujish went past, downslope toward the small trees that fringed the river. It had its great head cocked, as if it were listening for something. In a moment it came, a distant roar, followed by another and then a string of them. Relkin understood—there was a rivalry. They were marking out their territories. They probably did this every day.

As Relkin watched, the huge monster threw its head back and emitted another roar. The stiff tail and low-slung carriage of the body was more accentuated than it was in wyverns, and the head was all wrong, with the flatness of the forehead, where wyverns bulged with intelligence. The first roar was followed by more, a long series of satisfying bellows aimed at warning all others of its kind that this was its territory. Then it moved again, stepping down to the water, where it roared again.

It was time to move while the creature was preoccupied. Relkin scrambled to his feet and bolted into the forest. He turned upstream and kept going, ignoring the aches and pains in his legs following the jump. One place you didn't want to be, if alone and virtually without weapons, was on the ground close to active pujish.

When he paused for a breath, listening with every fiber of his being for nearby sounds in the woods, he was struck by the power of the death bone. The grandmothers had laid the death bone by his head and he'd been unable to shake it. And now it was hunting him. That damned death bone was coming for him.

Relkin awoke in the crook of a tree, sore in far too many places. When he shifted position, his back went into spasm and he nearly fell out of the tree. And on top of all the aches and pains, he'd slept badly, waking in sudden fright at loud sounds in the jungle. At night some pujish were very active, which wasn't conducive to a sound night's rest.

He prayed to Old Caymo to stop rolling those dice for a while. Relkin was having trouble handling the results. He consoled himself with the thought that at least nothing had tried to eat him in the night.

He started down. More aches and pains informed him that he had not escaped unscathed from that fall from the bluff into the river. Nothing was broken, but a lot of things were tender, from the ankles to the knees to the hips.

He repeated the sobering inventory from the previous night. He had a long knife and some of his tool kit, which had survived the river. He'd lost his boots, stuck in the gluey mud. Relkin shrugged; those boots had been pretty well played out anyway. His feet would harden up pretty quick. He just had to watch out for thorns from now on.

The first necessity of the day was to find something to eat. Armed with only a knife, he would have to content himself with fruit or nuts for the time being. Once he'd made himself a new hunting bow, then things would improve.

He looked around for the trees that Lumbee had made him familiar with, the eem and the pik-o-pok in particular, since these were in season. At first he saw nothing but pines; then he saw a grove of pik-o-poks and headed that way.

He was in luck. These pik-o-poks were filled with nearly ripe pods. In a few minutes he'd cut enough for a breakfast of sorts. Then he split open the pods and ate the large, tasty beans inside. They had a sweet, nutty flavor and a coarse consistency. He filled up on them and then drank from a clear-running stream. He rose refreshed, his hunger sated at least in part, and after stretching exercises he reduced the soreness from the long, uncomfortable night in that tree.

He went slowly, ears alert for the slightest sound that might indicate pujish. Without Bazil on hand to wield mighty Ecator, or even a bow, Relkin felt decidedly unsafe in these ancient woods.

He searched for a place to make a quick crossing of the river. He decided it would be better to cross on a log rather than swimming, because of the risk of crocodiles. He'd been very fortunate the day before. Caymo was rolling some weird dice these days, that was for sure.

Then, as he often did, Relkin fell to wondering if the Great Mother was still guiding his steps. Did her presence pervade even here, in this wild land beyond the back of nowhere? Perhaps things were getting kind of shaky because she could no longer protect him from the effects of Caymo's dice play. And he knew that the strands of fortune were subject to wild shifts. There were levels of understanding that existed far beyond the world Ryetelth. Relkin had seen this, had heard the strange singing of the golden ones.

By the gods, but his legs hurt! That impact in the mud had come close to breaking his ankles.

He confronted the next problem in his mind: how to extract Bazil from the tribe without them realizing Relkin had survived.

Of course, he didn't have to do it that way. He could just go back to the camp publicly and accuse Ommi of trying to kill him. He could get justice for Wol and Ium if they'd been killed.

And he would also split the tribe irrevocably. The Ardu would fragment and be left virtually defenseless against the slavers once more. If they followed the natural round and went south, the slavers would get them. If they stayed in the north, they would starve. Even their gardens would fail them after a while. They could hunt three-horns by the lake, but that would mean competing with full-grown red-brown pujish, who were too much for Ardu spears and stones. The Ardu would be scattered and devoured and all Relkin's work would be wasted. Whatever they did they would be doomed, unless they banded together into a tribe and learned how to fight with their numbers to completely destroy the parties of slave raiders.

Relkin doubted that Caymo had ever thrown him more of a difficult play. For it went without saying that Relkin would go back to the camp and find the wyvern. No force in the world could keep a dragonboy from finding his dragon.

But how was he going to sneak a wyvern dragon away from a camp full of Ardu hunters? There was always someone on watch. Relkin thought about suppressing the watch. He did have the knife. It was a grim thought, but if he had to do it to free the dragon, then he would.

On his own, Relkin knew, Bazil would be lost. He might try heading north alone—and if anything could live in this jungle and prosper it was probably a two-ton battledragon armed with the fell blade Ecator—but without a dragonboy there would be problems with little wounds, split talons, parasites, and many other things. Relkin imagined the wyvern hunting for him up and down the land of Ardu suffering from a host of misery-inducing ailments.

No, Relkin had to go back. And then they'd have to sneak out of the camp with no one seeing them. Not an easy task, even if wyverns were naturally sneaky and capable of moving very quietly. And then they'd have to leave, with no good-byes. Anything else would only cause trouble and split the tribe. And Relkin was determined not to split the Ardu people. But it would be sad to leave without saying farewell to Lumbee.

He just prayed they hadn't killed Ium and Wol.

He finished the pods, then moved on. Intending to investigate the shoreline, he moved closer to the river, where he caught the smell of woodsmoke. Faint, but unmistakable, a fire was burning nearby. The rains were too recent for it to be a natural fire. Relkin felt impelled to investigate. The slavers must have hauled up their boat for the day. Perhaps they were in trouble? Sickness, or damage to the boat, whatever, Relkin knew he had to take a look at them.

For the next hour he moved stealthily toward the source of the smoke. As it grew stronger, he slowed his approach, eyes searching the way ahead for any hint of man. Eventually he looked out across a wide sandy clearing in the brush. The river loomed down below the beach. In the center was the smoldering remains of a fire. There was no one in sight.

Cautiously he approached the smoldering embers. The slavers were long gone. They had camped here the night before. Relkin could read the signs of disturbance in the sand. They had done a poor job of putting out their fire when they left.

He scuffed sand to smother the embers, then walked down to the water's edge to scan the water. No sail showed itself on the river. It was irrational, he knew, but he was disappointed. Some part of him had half expected to see that triangle of white. He had just started to turn when he felt something whir around his head and drop past his shoulders.

In the next instant it tightened into an expertly thrown lasso and his arms were pinned to his body. The shock was considerable, the surprise total. He braced himself and dug in his heels, but was still pulled off his feet and drawn helplessly across the sand by a powerful pull from the edge of the trees. A man appeared in his peripheral vision. A club was swinging. Then came the impact and the light went away in a blaze of sickening pain.

When he woke up, it was to a thundering headache and a regular, rhythmic motion. Wind soughed over him; he glimpsed the sky above and a billowing sail. He felt distinctly nauseous and for a few moments lay there just breathing, hoping the urge to vomit would subside. At last, it began to ebb and finally left him, but he was weak and felt cold sweat running down his back.

He shook his head to try to clear it, not altogether successfully. For a moment the nausea threatened to return. He made some more unpleasant discoveries. His wrists were bound behind him. His ankles were bound as well. The bonds had an expert feel to them, tight but not so tight as to cut off circulation.

Deliberately he looked up. Sitting watching him was a man with the coldest eyes Relkin had ever seen. Under a black topknot oiled and skewered with red lacquer needles, the eyes regarded him for a moment with cold humor.

The man spoke, over Relkin's head. Relkin heard a sour chuckle behind him. He noted the man's heavily muscled chest and arms, the leather vest and leggings and the brass-handled cutlass stuck in his belt. The man had the air of someone used to violence in all its forms.

There was more laughter behind Relkin and a big hand grabbed his face, which sent a flash of pain from his sore jaw, and turned it so he was looking into that of a fat man, red-faced, head shaved, with a big round nose and close-set brown eyes. He exuded a malicious glee. The red-faced fellow said something in Ardu that Relkin didn't catch, then repeated it in another tongue to the one with the topknot.

The red-faced man let go of his face with a laugh and Relkin caught a glimpse of a third man, tall, gray-faced, with stringy hair, but then his gaze dropped back to fall on the first man again.

The man said something in the slaver tongue. It was meaningless to Relkin, who shrugged. The man laughed. He had a cruel laugh. The man switched to crude Ardu. The pronunciation was off, but it was intelligible. Relkin was not surprised; of course the slavers had learned a smattering of the tongue of the people they preyed upon.

"You are No-Tail. We search for No-Tail. You just drop into our laps. Very good."

The man had the most unpleasant smile.

"Caught you sneaking around. Easy. One of the oldest tricks."

Relkin felt a hot flush creeping up his cheeks. Of course, just leave the fire burning a little, the Ardu would come to investigate, and then you took them captive with the rope and the cudgel. Damn! He hated to be thought of as "easy."

"Who are you, then?" said Relkin angrily.

"I Katun. Of Mirchaz. The slave city only. I take you there. You fetch a record price. Ardu No-Tail. Already the game lords seek you. You attract a lot of attention. You regret this."

Again the merciless smile. Relkin suspected the scarlet skewers indicated some kind of caste or elite status.

"Who them?" Relkin indicated with his head.

"That is Bilj, and Eidorf. Bilj, he want to take you like a woman. That is Bilj's way with boys like you."

Relkin's alarm must have showed, despite his effort to betray no emotion, because Katun smiled again, a little softer this time. "Katun kill Bilj, he touch hair of your head. You safe from Bilj while Katun alive."

Relkin swallowed. And Eidorf? Eidorf didn't seem worthy of a mention to Katun, at least in this context.

"We go south now, quick, quick. Get to Yazm City in few days. Then big boat to Mirchaz. We sell you in a moon."

This seemed to really amuse Katun.

For a week they followed the same routine. The rains had dwindled to occasional downpours, followed by blue skies and a burning sun that soon dried them out.