Dragon Stones (54 page)

"
You
must not know Dunshandrin very well, if you are even entertaining that possibility."

"This is my first visit here," the fellow murmured.

"Well, if you don't want it to be your last, you will forget about your merchandise and flee.  The dragon will not be satisfied with the castle; she will be coming here next."

The man bowed and thanked Diasa and went back to his henchmen; a whispered argument ensued.  Adaran gathered that the mercenaries expected to be paid regardless of the merchant's misfortune, but he had nothing with which to pay them.  Being a mercenary himself, Adaran was interested in how the argument would turn out; but then Diasa pulled him to his feet, and Tolaria took his other arm, and the three of them left the inn.

Outside, the street thronged with citizens and villagers fleeing the town.  Some were empty-handed, perhaps because they had nothing worth saving, or they expected to be returning to intact homes; others carried their belongings on their backs, or hauled them in carts, or pushed them in wheelbarrows.  Families walked together, mothers and fathers with children trailing along behind them like strings.  Dogs wove in and out among the dozens of pairs of legs, yapping as they tried to keep up with their owners; goats, pigs, chickens, and other sorts of animals moved with the crowd, under their own power or as baggage.  Adaran had never seen such an exodus before.

The two mercenaries passed them, shouldering their way through the crowd.  Adaran glanced at Diasa; she had noticed them, too, watching them with narrowed eyes.  She shook her head, then turned her gaze elsewhere.  He could imagine what had happened; they had collected their pay in the form of the merchant's life and any valuables he might have had with him.  At another time, Adaran might have scurried back to the inn and searched the man's body and room, looking for anything the killers had missed.  He supposed that Diasa might have confronted the two thugs and held them to account, while Tolaria might have hurried to the merchant's side to see if she could keep him alive.

At another time, perhaps.

But today, they just kept walking.

Limited by Adaran's injuries, they made slow progress; it seemed as if even the smallest child and oldest grandmother walked faster than he did.  Finally Diasa spotted an abandoned wheelbarrow overturned in an alley, and had the idea of dumping the footpad into it like a load of manure.  Prehn, of course, insisted on climbing into the wheelbarrow with him.  Evidently she had adopted him as a sort of surrogate father until Pyodor Ponn rejoined them.  Diasa knew little enough about children, but she supposed that eventually the girl would realize that something had happened, that Ponn would not be coming back.  Then there would be tears and wailing.

She would let Tolaria handle that.

Traffic became heavier as they moved toward the edge of town.  There was a single main road out of the village; the other streets and avenues converged here, funneling everyone into the same spot.  Nervous horses plowed furrows through the pedestrians; Diasa saw more than one commoner lying dead or injured, bleeding from wagon wheels or the blow of a driver's cudgel.

She cast a glance back at the castle, visible even from here atop its steep-sided perch.  T'Sian flitted among the towers, destroying the keep at her leisure.  All serious resistance had been eliminated; no eagles fluttered in the sky, no siege engines fired projectiles.  The dragon could have reduced the entire castle to rubble by now, but it seemed that she tarried.  Savoring the moment?  No, she was looking for something, Diasa thought; the lords of the realm, perhaps, those who had orchestrated the slaughter of her hatchlings.  If that was what the dragon sought, Diasa doubted she would find satisfaction.  They surely had a bolt-hole or secret passage to ensure their escape in the event of an emergency or an attack, and would have used it at the first sign of serious trouble.

They traveled some distance along the road, moving with the flow of refugees just like wreckage of the castle floated in the river to the left.  On the right, a denuded hillside rose gently to scrubby forest.  The trees on the slope looked like they had been recently cut; the stumps were fresh, still bleeding sap, the wood not yet weathered.  Diasa stopped, set down the wheelbarrow; people broke around them like water over a rock.  "This is far enough," she said.  "We'll stop here for now."

Adaran eyed the field of cut trees.  "Here?  This doesn't look like a good place to camp."

"Better than the dungeon, isn't it?"  Diasa gave the wheelbarrow a kick, earning her a baleful look from Prehn.  "On your feet."

He reached up.  "Some assistance?"

She and Tolaria helped Adaran up, each taking an arm over her shoulder, abandoning the wheelbarrow by the riverside. Almost immediately, a passing family began piling their meager belongings into it; a better use than hauling a thief around, Diasa thought.  They moved up onto the slope, taking care on the uneven ground, but hadn't gone far before Adaran began to complain, whining and muttering about his feet.  Disgusted, Diasa shrugged his arm off her shoulder; Tolaria caught him before he fell and lowered him to the ground.  "We're stopping here, then?" Tolaria said, her voice brittle.

"It's as good a place as any," Diasa said.  She sat down on a stump, using the last of the daylight to watch T'Sian's antics.  The dragon had perched partway up the north tower now, clinging to the bricks in the manner of a desert lizard sunning itself on the side of a rock; but she clutched a crumbling stone column in her tail, and was using it as a club to smash the roof of the eastern keep.  That was a trick no gecko could match.  At length she cast aside the pillar and moved to the ruined wall of the keep, staring down into the interior, reminding Diasa of a cat that had spotted a vole and was waiting for it to reappear.

"We need a fire," Tolaria said.  "There's a chill, and I must boil water to prepare a poultice."

"Fine," Diasa said, not looking at her.  "They left behind plenty of branches when they cut down the trees.  I'm sure you can find sufficient kindling to start an inferno."

After a moment, Tolaria said:  "Yes, I suppose I can."  Diasa heard her move off to gather wood.  The oracle didn't like her much, Diasa supposed; she had probably been accustomed to being coddled for her talents and her looks, before the twins had taken her.  In Tolaria's world, Diasa would be gathering the branches and laying them at her feet, lighting the fire, fetching her slippers.

This was
Diasa's
world, though.

And in Diasa's world, the woman with the sword did not gather the wood.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The stones were growing.

From her perch on the rampart, T'Sian could see the mass of blue crystals within the castle.  She had cracked the keep open like a tasty bone, laying bare its marrow of hallways and stairs and chambers.  The explosion of Qalor's laboratory had seeded the place with crystals, scattering bits of them across the structure.  The red ones had merely fallen to the ground, but the blue ones had taken hold where they touched a surface, affixing themselves, spreading.

T'Sian was not sure what to make of this.  She had never seen the crystals behave this way.  They grew, but only at the source, where they were pushed up from the depths of the earth.  Once removed, they did not continue to spread; they sat quietly in the back of her lair, where she could go and consume them when her fires burned low.  If they
did
grow in the lair, then there would be no need to travel to the icy wastes north of Yttribia, to plumb the depths of the glacial caverns.  Sometimes dragons died there, old ones mostly, overcome by the cold.  She had seen the massive corpses, brittle and frozen, claws outstretched as if they were still trying to drag themselves along the frigid stone.

Clearly, Qalor had done this; the clever man had altered the crystals to make them grow for him, so that he would not have to go in search of them in the future.  He wanted to raise them himself and have an endless supply.  Why just the blue stones, though?  Why not the red ones as well?

The damaged wall suddenly gave way beneath her, crumbling in a shower of rubble.  She let go and gave her great wings a few beats, lifting her into the air, blowing dust, smoke, and cinders into whorls and eddies, covering the glowing stones in a thin layer of grit.  Bemused, she left the castle, heading for the village.  She circled it a few times, frightening the few humans who remained.  She watched as they ran for the cover of their homes or businesses.  She had just sacked their leader's fortress, and yet they thought thin walls of wood and plaster would protect them?  Foolish men.

She had told Diasa not to remain in the village.  Assuming they would have stopped not far from town, the dragon flew in a high spiral, soon spotting them gathered around a small fire on a hillside.  She noted a rocky clearing in the woods, not far from where they had camped.  She knew that the others preferred to deal with her when she wore a human shape; she could land in the clearing, transform, and approach them in the guise of a woman.  She would be less likely to draw an attack that way, but also less able to defend herself.

No.  She would stay in her true shape.  Their sensitivities were of no concern anymore.  They could face her as she was, not as they wished her to be.

She was finished accommodating the prejudices of men.

When Pyodor Ponn awoke, he found himself wedged among the debris that had accumulated against the bridge that led to the castle, like a storm-tossed log or a piece of driftwood.  The sky was growing purple, streaked with dusk; he must have been in the water for quite some time.  He thought for a moment, trying to remember how he had gotten here.  He had been climbing down the cliff when there had been an explosion, like the ones Dunshandrin's forces had set off during the raid on Astilan.  He'd lost his tenuous grip on the bluff and slid down the chute like a piece of garbage, bouncing off the jagged rocks at the bottom, striking his head.  That was the last thing he remembered before waking up here.  He reached up and felt his skull, finding a huge lump, but the cold had numbed him and there was no pain.

When the current had washed him up against the bridge, he had become entangled in the denuded branches of a tree; its half-rotted limbs cradled him like the arms of a rescuer, but they could just have easily have pinned him below the water and drowned him.  In life, this must have been a beneficent tree.  He gave brief thanks to its departed spirit for saving his life.  Now he had to get out of the water; if he stayed much longer in the icy river, the cold would succeed in killing him where the water had failed.  Taking hold of the branches with trembling hands, he hauled himself onto the unstable mat of reeds and leaves and yellowed grasses.  He crawled along this small island, feeling it shift beneath his weight.  His right hand suddenly broke through the thin crust of dry vegetation, plunging into a cold, wet, sticky layer of sand and muck and refuse from the cesspool.  He freed himself with effort; the clammy mud didn't want to give up its prize, clinging to his wrist as he struggled to work it loose.  When he finally pulled free, he nearly toppled over backwards, but the dead tree intervened again, catching him with its branches and keeping him from falling into the river.

After regaining his balance, Ponn rested a moment, then moved forward again.  He soon reached the base of the bridge, where the pile rested on a foundation of stone.  Holding the rock, he pulled himself to his feet; his legs were numb and weak, it felt very much like standing on a poorly constructed raft.  Shivering, he peered under the bridge.  The column rose from a small island of red rock that jutted up from the river; the arch curved overhead, an unbroken expanse of stone.  This was a natural bridge, he realized; they had reinforced it with bricks and masonry, providing extra support, but the span itself had been carved by the natural action of water and time.

He looked up at the castle.  Tendrils of smoke rose from a number of places, twining around each other like vines, eventually forming a massive, soft-looking column that drifted off to the north.  While he'd been unconscious, T'Sian had reduced the place to a ruin; he was sorry to have missed the show.

He thought of Adaran and Diasa.  They had been on the ledge beneath the wall when it exploded.  Had they survived the blast?  The destruction of the castle?  Had he rescued Adaran from the dungeon only to leave him buried beneath tons of rubble?  He would never find out unless he got off the river; he needed to find warmth and shelter, and quickly.  His shivering worsened as his garment slowly dried in the chill night air, sucking warmth out of his body and giving it to the greedy wind.  Could he swim or wade to shore?  He felt too weak to brave the current as it rushed through the narrow gaps to either side of the stone column.  It would surely sweep him away.

Perhaps there was another way out of here.  The castle must have maintenance staff that periodically cleared the debris; otherwise it would become completely blocked and the river would flood.  They would need a way to get down, unless they were lowered by a rope.  Ponn stood and felt around the support, not finding any obvious handholds.  He moved to the left, looking under the bridge, where a crumbling ledge of brick and masonry led along the abutment.  He stepped down to it, first with his splayed toes, testing it with a few firm pushes.  It seemed sturdy, so he followed with his other foot, standing on the narrow surface.  Keeping his back against the rock, he sidled along the walkway.  The water rushed by in front of him, black and foamy.