Servant of the Dragon (11 page)

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Sharina thought for a moment that Diora was going to come over to her, but at the last moment the maid lost her nerve and burrowed deeper into the crowd, out of sight.

Telling her mistress privately about the bridge had been one thing. This time, though, Diora had addressed Prince Garric himself in front of all the world. No wonder she was terrified.

Smiling slightly, Sharina turned her attention back to the bridge wavering above the Beltis. Tomorrow she'd calm Diora and assure her that she'd been right to speak—as she certainly had. There was nothing to be done tonight that wouldn't just scare the girl worse. Sharina rested her fingertips lightly on Cashel's forearm.

The structure seemed to have been outlined in pastels. During the coldest winter in living memory, the Northern Lights had hung above Barca's Hamlet. The bridge looked only a little more solid than those. It wasn't frightening, exactly, but it
was
uncanny.

"I see people moving there," Cashel said. His eyes narrowed. "At least I think I do."

Garric glanced at Tenoctris. She still sat on the stones, murmuring as her bamboo sliver tapped time. Liane had hovered protectively over the old wizard while the rest of them were concerned with Lord Mos and the others. "Does she...?" Garric asked.

Liane turned a palm up in the equivalent of a shrug. With a wince of embarrassment she then resheathed the little dagger she'd concealed in her other hand. "She hasn't said anything, Garric," Liane said. "Except for the spell."

"That bridge isn't anything like the one that used to cross the Beltis here," Garric said. He spoke loud enough for all of them to hear him, but it seemed to Sharina that her brother was really organizing his thoughts. "The one King Carus knew. It doesn't even look like a bridge, though it was one when I crossed it in my dream."

"This is where you visited Ansalem?" Liane asked.

"It's
how
I went," Garric said with a smile. "I'm not sure it's really a 'where', either here or in my dream."

A shriek that couldn't have been human—it was too loud, too loud even for a horse—keened through the night. Cashel spun around, but the sound didn't come from nearby.

Sharina took her hand from the hilt of the Pewle knife. It probably didn't come from this world at all, any more than the structure glimmering in the air did.

Tenoctris gave a muted sigh and set her stylus down. She wavered and might have fallen over herself if Ilna hadn't knelt and put an arm around her in time.

Ilna looked up with an expression of cool achievement. Sharina met her friend's eyes and grinned. Liane had been protecting the old wizard from being trampled, but Ilna had been watching Tenoctris herself.

"Help me up, please," Tenoctris said. Ilna rose, straightening at the knees and supporting the older woman with the arm around her shoulders. Garric held out a hand; Ilna acknowledged the offer with a nod, but she didn't need the help and had no intention of accepting it.

Sharina tried to imagine a world in which everybody was like Ilna. It would be a polite place and everything would be done right.

It would also be a very frightening world; a lot like walking over a crust of stone and knowing that a volcano bubbled just underneath. Not that Ilna would ever let loose the rage and power within her....

Sharina reached over and squeezed Ilna's arm. Just a friendly touch, a friend's touch. Ilna gave her a wry smile as though she understood what Sharina had been thinking; and agreed.

Tenoctris straightened and took a deep breath. "Do you know what it is then?" Garric asked. He couldn't hide his impatience, but he managed to sound apologetic about it.

"I won't know that for a very long time," Tenoctris said. She attempted a smile, but she was too exhausted to carry it off. Some things could only be learned or accomplished by wizardry, but its use required brutal effort and great danger even if the wizard didn't make a mistake.

When wizards
did
err, the only question was how many others they dragged with them to Hell. It was error as much as intent that had smashed the Old Kingdom to bloody shards, and another wizard's blunder now would end all hope of civilization for the Isles.

Because the crowd had grown still at the shriek, Sharina could hear other voices. They were too high pitched to be human, and she couldn't tell whether they were laughing or gibbering in terror. Like the bridge itself, the sounds faded in and out of awareness.

The frogs that normally formed a shrilling chorus in the shallows at the river's margin were silent also. A fish slapped the water far out in the current, leaping away from some perceived danger.

"What I was trying to do tonight...," Tenoctris said. She gathered strength with each word. Now she patted Ilna's hand in thanks and release, then stood upright on her own. "Is determine whether the force we're witnessing is cyclical or is increasing in magnitude. If I thought it were going to go away by itself, I'd be inclined to let it do so."

She gave them a weary smile. "Unfortunately, it'll grow until it's removed, and removing will be as difficult as moving Valles to the north coast of Ornifal. Or perhaps simply shifting the whole city to Haft."

Cashel stretched his arms upward, holding his staff crossways over his head where it wouldn't threaten any of the people around him. He grinned. "So," he said. "Do we start moving Valles a building at a time, or does it have to be the whole place at once?"

Tenoctris laughed transformingly. She was still obviously tired, but no longer did her face wear a patina of desperate concern. Cashel had reminded the old wizard that she was among friends, and that these friends—
her
friends—had halted onrushing chaos before.

"Well, what I think we'll do is to get help," Tenoctris explained. "More precisely, we'll find the wizard who's responsible for this appearing and convince him to remove it."

"Ansalem?" Garric asked.

Tenoctris shrugged. "It might be Ansalem," she said, "if he were alive. Ansalem was like no one, no
thing
, I've ever met. It's not a bridge exactly; that's just how our human minds perceive it. It's a point where planes of the cosmos merge. It isn't really evil, but the amount of damage it can do simply by—"

There were screams; and this time they were human. A man flung himself into the river, bellowing in hoarse terror. A thing of rosy light loped through the crowd, looking as desperately frightened as the people trying to get away from it.

It was man-sized or almost and built—almost—like a man. It had two arms and two legs, but they were shaggy and the legs bent the wrong way. They ended in goat hooves which clacked on the pavement when the creature looked most solid.

The faun faded to a pale blur which ran through a sedan chair and the bejeweled young woman seated in it. She screamed, but she'd been screaming already. Sharina couldn't see that she was any the worse for her experience.

Two strides beyond the sedan chair, the faun's outline sharpened into the solidity of a red jasper statue. He—the faun was unclothed and there was no doubt about his sex—was running down the esplanade in the general direction of Sharina and her friends.

He leaped. A husky man in a butcher's leather apron dodged in the same direction. They collided. It was the man who went down, though the faun gave a despairing bleat as he caromed off.

He was headed straight toward Sharina. His pointed face was a mask of panic. She drew her Pewle knife, but Cashel stepped in front of her with his quarterstaff beginning to rotate. The faun bounded upward like a deer—

And vanished in mid air, leaving only a smudge of dissipating scarlet flickers where he'd been.

"Oh...," said Sharina, feeling the muscles over her ribs relax. She felt as she had the day a hornet—swift, mindless and viciously dangerous—had flown at her face.

The butcher lay on the stones, moaning and trying to staunch the blood with his hands. The faun's sharp hooves had sliced through the apron and deep into his left thigh, cutting like paired knives. A woman and a boy were helping the butcher—the one tearing a bandage from the hem of her tunic, the other cradling the older man's head and mumbling reassurance while tears ran down his face.

Most of the other spectators had fled from the riverside. The noblewoman stood in her sedan chair, sobbing uncontrollably. Her three guards ringed her, their swords drawn, but the bearers who should be carrying her away in the vehicle had instead fled unencumbered. After a moment's discussion, the group made off on foot. Two of the guards helped their mistress over the cobblestones.

Cashel didn't relax, though he lowered his quarterstaff. "What was that?" he asked quietly.

"Someone who shouldn't be here," Tenoctris said. "Not a danger in himself—not much of one, at any rate—but a symptom of what the problem is. So long as the connection is here, things fall through holes in the cosmos. Some of them could be very dangerous indeed."

Sharina saw something in the sky above the bridge. At first she thought it was a remnant of the sparks into which the faun had dissolved. It shimmered like haze at sunrise; then it had winged shape, a bird stroking slowly in the direction of Sharina and her friends.

The red light faded. The bird wavered out of focus, then reappeared.

"I think we can return to the palace now," Tenoctris said. "I've learned all I can here tonight."

She smiled wanly. "In part because I'm too tired to do any more."

Sharina glanced back. Their carriage waited forlornly at the edge of the esplanade, now generally deserted. The butcher limped away, supported by the woman and a man of his own age who'd returned to help him.

Liane was speaking to Garric. Sharina looked to see if the bird had vanished the way the faun did. It was still in the sky—and huge.

"All right—" said Garric.

"What's that?" Sharina asked, pointing upward. Immediately she felt uncomfortable about the gesture, as though she'd called attention to herself when she shouldn't have.

Cashel looked up and frowned. He stepped between Sharina and the bird. Was it too large to call a bird? When Sharina first saw the creature, she'd thought of it as a gull. It was growing. Now it had a span of forty feet.

Garric had begun to sheath his long sword. He hesitated, then slammed the blade home in its scabbard after all. A naked sword was an awkward thing to hold. Garric had shown he could clear the weapon in a heartbeat if the situation required that.

The bird's wings flapped again. The slow stroke didn't bring it closer, but the thing grew enormously in size. Its pinions were scaly and a hundred feet across. The creature had a toothed beak and three clawed fingers at the elbow joint of each wing. It cocked its long head sideways, fixing Sharina with the glare of one fiery eye.

"Get down!" Garric shouted, sweeping his sword out again. "Cashel, you and me!"

Liane took Tenoctris in her arms and lay down, covering the old woman with her body. Sharina drew the Pewle knife, but she realized that Garric was right: he and Cashel needed a clear field to use their strength and weapons. She flattened on the stones, her face turned to the side so she could watch the sky. Her own knife, the sharp little blade Liane carried, and Ilna's noose were all effective enough in the right circumstances; but not against a monster like the one now filling the night sky.

Sharina doubted that Garric's sword could do much either. Cashel, though....

Cashel set his staff rotating with the deliberation of a careful craftsman. He held the hickory at either side of the balance, then crossed his wrists as the staff turned; and again, and again, and—

The spinning circle was a common technique with a quarterstaff. The stout hickory protected the staff-wielder, and he could strike out of the circuit with either end if the enemy pressed him.

In Cashel's hands, however, the staff was more than a physical object. Sparkles of blue fire, then sizzling trails of light dripped from both ferrules as the quarterstaff spun before him. His legs were set and braced, facing the threat and determined to beat it or die.

The bird banked slightly. A flash of ruby fire showed its massive reptilian form in the jeweled detail of dew on a morning spiderweb. Its beak opened to call.

It was on them. Garric's sword swung forward, Cashel's staff was a disk of solid sapphire light, and the bird—

The bird vanished as though it never was.

Sharina got to her feet. Liane covered Tenoctris, supporting her own weight on her palms. She raised her head to make sure the danger had passed, then began helping the older woman up.

Ilna stood gracefully and coiled her silken noose around her waist. She caught Sharina's eye and gave her friend a wry smile. "I didn't know what good it was going to do either," she said, "but I felt better with it in my hands."

Sharina grinned and sheathed the Pewle knife in reply.

The driver of the carriage was fighting with the reins, and the postillion clung to the off-horse's harness. The beasts were neighing in terror even now that the danger was over. Only the servants' skill—and courage—had kept the team from bolting down one of the narrow streets entering the esplanade. The carriage would inevitably have smashed on the corner of a building.