Dragonlinks (9 page)

‘I thought your story involved a merchant father?'

‘You're right,' said Zimak with a frown. ‘Well, maybe a Skelt arrowhead on crossed sheaves of wheat?'

‘Sheaves are the heraldic icon of farmers.'

‘Well, what about – there he is now, descending the stairs!'

Jelindel did not move her head, but let her eyes alone follow the tall, angular figure who was on the creaking steps. His head was largely obscured by a black cowl, and if not for Zimak's interest she would not have noticed his passing. His robes had subtle symbols woven into the
hems, although Jelindel could not discern them clearly at that distance. A casual sweep of some thin magical aura combed through the room, and Jelindel felt herself shiver, although it was quite warm. As the man turned to walk across to the door she got a clear look at his face.

‘White Quell protect us, I think it's the mage!' she said in a hushed voice.

‘I was right!' Zimak hissed in surprise, as though he was not used to being right. ‘An immortal mage, hundreds of years old.'

‘Or the mortal grandson of a dead mage, around sixty years old,' Jelindel speculated. ‘There was a resemblance to the woodcut I saw, but no more so than – say – your own face bearing a likeness to your own –'

‘Stop that!'

‘ – dead merchant parents.'

‘Have your own way,' Zimak said, standing up. ‘Follow me, Jaelin, and
you
learn.'

Jelindel hurried after Zimak. When she reached the street she could see him scurrying after the man they knew as Thull.

Jelindel caught up with Zimak and whispered urgently, ‘What are we doing?'

‘Following him.'

‘What?' she said incredulously. ‘Why?'

‘This is a
real
mage, and he's on a quest for an enchanted mailshirt. If I should be on hand when he needs help, why – he may reward me handsomely. He may even make me an apprentice Adept.'

‘Utter garbage,' retorted Jelindel.

Zimak looked wild and eager, as if he were about to fight in a street tournament. ‘The only mage that I've ever
set eyes upon is Fa'red, and even he has given up the practice of enchantment to be a merchant.'

‘Or so it is voiced about,' said Jelindel, frowning.

‘What do you mean by that?'

‘I can read, and I am widely read, Zimak. Fa'red has not abandoned the practice of thaumaturgy. I see little signs that I understand in the writings about him.'

‘Tch! How would you know? You're not even an Adept 1 in the arts of magic.'

‘And neither are you.' Jelindel tugged at Zimak's sleeve but she could see he was in no mind to listen to reason. ‘I'm starting to think that the Preceptor's civil militia was a much better idea,' Jelindel said unhappily. She quickened her pace in spite of her doubts.

After a quarter-hour of winding streets and furtive shadowing, they ducked behind a cart as Thull stopped in one of the more respectable streets of D'loom. Jelindel took out a roll of reedpaper with scribeglass lenses at either end and peered through it at the mage.

‘What's that?' asked Zimak suspiciously.

Jelindel steadied her device to focus on Thull. Her lips moved as if by rote. ‘Five years ago a Skelt philosopher saw a scribe's children playing with a pair of old, scratched scribeglasses. He asked what they were doing, and they said they were playing mages: moving buildings and ships nearer as though by magic. He tried the trick himself, and found that it did work. His name for the thing is farsight, and he even used one to discover mountains on Reculemoon and Blanchemoon.'

Zimak saw now that it was two tubes, one inside the other. Jelindel adjusted the focus slightly.

‘I made this farsight from a pair of old scribeglasses.
It can resolve Specmoon as a crescent – tch, I thought so. Look!'

Thull seemed to spit a wad of phlegm at an ornately carved creststone. He then splayed his fingers over the surface before walking a hundred paces and doing the same thing again. Without a glance back he crossed the street and turned a corner.

‘Hurry, after him!' hissed Zimak, but Jelindel grabbed his tunic.

‘He will be back. Come look at this.'

There was a pale blue globule of glowing jelly where Thull had spat. A thin blue line stretched out from it along the wall to where he had stopped a second time. Jelindel turned to regard the archway that spanned a cobbled courtyard on the other side of the street.

‘The man suffers from an enchanted cold,' said Zimak.

‘It's not phlegm, silly. It's a little measure of his life-force. He crossed the street and went around that corner, so … whose house is that across the street?'

‘Fa'red's. He's the merchant – and former mage – that I carried the message to this morning. What's Thull doing?'

‘Come back to the cart. I'll explain as we go.'

Now it was Zimak's turn to trail behind Jelindel. ‘Thull did not actually spit, he merely spoke a word that released a part of his life-force that stuck to the wall. He has gone to the street behind Fa'red's house by now and is using mage-light from that fragment of his life-force to look through the walls of the house.' She looked at Zimak knowingly. ‘It's just as you look through the weave of thin curtains to watch the market's dancing girls undressing by lamplight.'

‘If they really cared they'd use thicker curtains,' said Zimak huffily.

‘Whatever. According to
The Watcher's Guide to Magic as Practised
, this is very powerful magic. It takes many decades to master the speaking of one word of life-force. The word is easy to speak, but the danger is that you can easily speak out your entire life-force. Do that and you would be more likely to survive a slashed throat.'

‘Decades … perhaps even centuries?' Zimak guessed in awe. ‘I
knew
he was a potent mage. What did I tell you!'

‘What you told me might be right, but what you seem to want to do is not sensible,' Jelindel said, trying to smother Zimak's eagerness. ‘This is madness, Zimak. Come back to the Boar and Bottle. The Preceptor's officer may still be there.'

‘Pah, he's there every month, but appointments with destiny only come once in a lifetime –'

‘ – but more often than not at that lifetime's end,' Jelindel snapped, adding the end of the famous quotation.

‘You can go if you like, Jaelin.'

‘No,' she sighed. ‘I'll watch – at a distance.'

The mage returned after a few minutes and touched the wall again. A faint blue flash seemed to snap back to his hand and coil about it even as he spoke a soundless word. Then, like a vapourish snake, the blue glow leaped into his mouth. Anyone watching from afar would not have seen it, but Jelindel was again using her farsight.

They followed Thull as he returned to the market area. He made for a blacksmith's shop between the market and the docks.

‘You wait outside and keep watch. I'll go in,' Zimak
whispered as they crouched in an alleyway beside the smithy.

Before Jelindel could reply he had jumped straight up and grabbed the rope dangling from a loading beam projecting from a loft. He climbed hand over hand up the rope and vanished into the darkness of the loft.

‘Keep watch for what?' Jelindel said to herself.

She walked around to the back to the stables, climbed over the rail and made her way between the horses waiting to be re-shod. There were sacks of wood and coal stacked near the back of the shop, and the ground was strewn with straw in the area clear of the forge. Stepping quietly, she moved in until she could hear voices beyond some bundles of hay.

‘So I did all ye asked when we spoke yesterday,' the blacksmith was saying. ‘All my customers know not to come here till the morrow's morn, and I'll keep the shop bolted fer that time.'

‘For fifty silver argents it is not a lot to ask,' Thull replied.

Jelindel peered over the bundles of hay. She sensed something wrong in Thull's voice. The blacksmith sensed it too, and was glancing about nervously.

‘So what am I ter do while ye rent the shop?' the blacksmith asked. He was a classic image of a blacksmith, and towered like a mountain over the stick figure of Jabez Thull.

‘Just lie about,' said Thull smoothly, then he spat blue sparks into the blacksmith's face and slashed a blade across his throat.

Somewhere above Jelindel's right Zimak gasped with shock. Thull whirled and flung his bloody dagger but
missed as the blacksmith staggered into him, gasping his last breath. Thull pushed him away. Empty-handed and beginning to panic, Thull shouted a binding word and blue coils burst from his mouth and smothered Zimak.

Jelindel couldn't believe the suddenness with which everything happened. She glanced to the left and saw the blacksmith fall dead, then she turned back to the loft. Zimak had fallen paralysed to the hay, and was not visible.

The mage climbed the ramp to the loft and knelt beside the stricken Zimak.

‘So, it's my eager and diligent message boy,' he said pensively.

‘Just … following,' came Zimak's strangled voice above the distant rumbling of wheels and general commotion of the market. ‘You paid … well. Thought to get more … work.'

Thull whispered something, and a sparkling sphere materialised and hung just above the mage's head.

‘Tell me this and no more: does any other man, woman or churl such as this clown watch me or listen to my words? Go.'

The sphere expanded slowly, attenuating as it went. Jelindel thought to run, but she suspected that a running target would present no problem to Thull. Drawing on what she had learned watching the market charmvendors she quickly described an Asniclian symbol in the air and traced a holy circle around it. It was only a weak charm to elude Thull's questing spell, but she had nothing else.

The sphere touched the tiny sparkle of her charm and smothered it. She counted two heartbeats, then a feeling like a thousand ice-cold fingertips brushing the skin beneath her clothing crawled over her.

She almost cried out, but somehow managed to remain still. The slave spirit considered her, then whispered, ‘No … not
quite …
' and was gone. Moments later it contracted back to glow before Thull's face.

‘No man, woman or churl watches or listens,' said the sad, disembodied voice that had whispered to Jelindel. Thull spoke another word and the globe vanished into his mouth.

Jelindel tried to will her pounding heart to slow down.
My charm did nothing, and that thing knew I was here. Thull did not ask about girls, however, so it ignored me. It was a slave. Maybe it only followed its master's orders to the letter out of sheer spite. It's true, no man, woman or churl am I
! Cautiously she peered above the hay.

Thull was shaking his head as he scowled down at Zimak. ‘You have cost me dearly, wretch,' he snarled, delivering a kick to the boy's helpless body. ‘The coils that hold you would tether an elephant, but part of my life-force is bound within them until midnight and there is nothing I can do to get it back before then. Damn you! This day is the very one when I need all the power I can bring to bear.' He kicked Zimak again. ‘Damn you for causing me alarm!'

Hope flared in Jelindel's thoughts. Whatever Thull was doing in D'loom, it would tax his powers to the limit, and very soon. She watched Thull touch the blue coils binding Zimak softly, caressingly.

‘Contract slowly, until all life has fled his body, then return to me,' he said gloatingly. ‘Squeeze him but do not kill him until a single half-minute before sidereal midnight. Make this miscreant suffer for the full measure of time.'

The mage walked down the ramp from the loft. He looked about before going to the back door where he uttered a minor word at the bar and sealed it. Crossing the shop again he dragged the dead blacksmith to within a yard of where Jelindel was hiding and spread empty sacks over the body.

Jelindel clenched her eyes shut, as though doing so might make her invisible. Above the pounding of her heart, she heard Thull unbar the front doors and walk out.

Cautiously she eased her head up in time to see thin tendrils of blue light boil through the wooden doors, seize the heavy wooden bar and swing it down into the cradle bolted to the doorframe. They remained, almost invisible but binding the bar fast.

Jelindel waited for a moment, then hurried up the ramp to the loft where Zimak lay. If he was surprised to see her he was in too much pain to show it. He could barely raise the breath to whisper.

‘I heard what he said,' Jelindel explained as she bent over him.

‘Do … do books … have you read for this?' Zimak's eyes were glazed, almost lifeless things.

‘
The Watcher's Guide to Magic as Practised
mentioned this sort of thing, yes. These coils are a part of Thull's life-force, and they can only be removed by his word or his death.'

‘Or … mine.'

‘Not so,' Jelindel said in a rather clinical way. ‘If you die, they still stay until midnight. Now then, killing such a powerful mage as Thull is well beyond my skills. I've never killed anything larger than a mosquito. Still, he told
the coils to take their time as they squeeze the life from you, so we have until midnight.' She paused, trying to think calmly while on the very edge of panic. ‘Look, Zimak, stay here … there are, perhaps, more arcane avenues to try.'

‘Stay here … he says,' Zimak rasped as she left.

Jelindel hurriedly slid down the rope of the loft's loading beam and made for the south-east quarter of the port city. She was more familiar with the streets by now, but somehow they always reminded her of that first, terror-soaked night alone.