Servant of the Dragon (20 page)

"Bridge?" said Ansalem. "I don't remember making a bridge. But there's so much I don't remember. You say it's all gone out there?"

He gestured, not to the window overlooking the city but rather to the alabaster screen from behind which the benevolent despot Ansalem the Wise granted audience to the folk of Klestis. From inside this chamber Garric could see fruit trees growing in the planters and the bordering beds of portulocca that waved in a mild breeze. There were no people here, however.

"Yes," said Carus. "All gone. There's nothing but a waste. There aren't even goats to crop the grass in the streets."

"That's because I never woke up," the old wizard said, shaking his head in an attempt to understand what he knew had happened. "Why do you suppose Purlio and the others would have sealed me in here in my dreams? They must have known that Klestis couldn't survive without me. Didn't they?"

"Maybe they didn't care," Carus said. He hooked his thumbs in his swordbelt, facing Ansalem like the grim statue of a war god. "Certainly they didn't care."

"Sir?" said Garric. "We need to break the enchantment and return you to where you belong. Can you tell us how to do that?"

"Oh, you can't do that, boy," the old wizard said with a dismissive wave. "Only the amphisbaena could do that, and—"

As Ansalem spoke, Garric felt a force snatch him with the suddenness of a released bowstring. The chamber blurred. Garric was rushing through time and space, watching the cosmos reverse about him.

Faintly through the gray darkness he heard Ansalem saying, "—the amphisbaena is here with me!"

* * *

Sharina had a stitch in her side from straining against the bird's unmoving talons. She hadn't noticed it in her relief at being dropped at last on the beach, but she surely did now.

The rib muscles were a lance of gasping pain every time her right leg extended, and another punishing jolt when her toes touched the ground to take her weight.

She dodged a dome of multiflora roses. They were lovely in season—the season was past—but also the worst brambles in the woods. Because Sharina was tired and hurting, she didn't allow enough clearance. A tendril drew three long cuts across her left forearm and snatched threads from the tip of her crimson sash as well.

That'll show them I passed this way,
she thought. But the villagers were following anyway, as relentless as yellow-jackets and as murderously inclined. Sharina heard them not very far behind her, calling to one another in vicious glee.

The armored warriors would be a long way back. That didn't help, because if a score of peasants with rocks and choppers ringed their victim they were more than a match for even a swordsman like Garric—if they were willing to pay the price.

The Pewle knife hung on a broad belt drawn tight so that it didn't flop while the wearer was in violent motion. Sharina didn't touch the hilt at the thought—it would have thrown off her stride—but she smiled grimly all the same. There'd be a price to pay before they brought this lone woman down, too.

The track she'd followed away from the settlement had dribbled to nothingness half a mile back. Sharina kept running, picking her route with an eye well accustomed to the woods; but not
these
woods, and night was falling.

"Lady," she mouthed. She was too fatigued for a proper prayer. "Lady, help me Your servant."

A clearing—it wasn't really a clearing; it was a broad swath on which all the growth was stunted—cut through the forest at a diagonal to Sharina's path. She swung left rather than make the acute angle to the right that would have brought her back more in the direction of her pursuers. The villagers might know, must know, about this stretch of relatively easy going. They'd be cutting through the woods already to block their prey if she tried to double back on it.

Sharina didn't try to hide in the taller growth on the other side instead of running in one direction or the other along the track. Her cape wasn't long enough to cover her bleached-wool tunics, and they'd flash like fire in the moonlit forest. Her skin was paler yet, and her hair was a bright blond flag to signal those who wanted her life.

She thought at first that she was following a seam of dense volcanic rock, less permeable to water and seeds struggling to root themselves than the limestone that underlay most of the terrain. The path was too straight, though, and too broad: twenty feet across, and more regular that most of the streets in Valles.

This was a boulevard: an ancient roadway laid with such skill that the only purchase for roots was the thin layer of soil that had drifted over the pavement during centuries of disuse.

Sharina brushed aside a stunted pine and strode through the bed of ivy that carpeted a wide stretch of the path. Her toes easily tore the stems, tossing behind her a trail of the soft, broad leaves.

Birds lifted from overhanging branches in a chorus of whirrs and the clatter of wings against the foliage. She'd disturbed doves or perhaps quail who'd already roosted for the night.

The roadway intersected an overgrown wall at a corbelled arch that must have been thirty feet tall when it was complete. The top had fallen in. The head that had originally glared down on those passing through the entrance now lay in the gateway on a pile of the small squared stones into which it had been set.

The head was that of a serpent, sculpted in a squared idiom that made it more, not less, awesome to unfamiliar eyes like Sharina's. The jaws were large enough to envelope her torso had they been flesh and not stone; a forked tongue curled out of them. Florid carvings, some of them lesser heads, covered all the surfaces of the great bust.

Sharina put her hand on the cold stone as she slipped past, slowing lest she turn an ankle on the jumble of overgrown stones.

She'd reached the great complex she'd seen while she hung in the bird's claws. She couldn't turn aside now. The boulevard was a notch in the canopy, allowing more sunlight to penetrate to ground level than it did elsewhere in the forest. In that bounty the vegetation to either side had grown impenetrable with honeysuckle and thorns.

It didn't matter: Sharina couldn't run much farther with this fire in her side, and perhaps it was time to make a stand anyway.

She stepped out of the direct sight of those pursuing and took stock. A street extended the line of the boulevard. The building to her immediate right was a ruin whose original outline was beyond imagining. A gigantic oak tree grew from piled rocks whose squared corners were the only evidence the mound wasn't natural.

Beyond that ruin was a structure at least a hundred and fifty feet long. Like the exterior walls and all the other visible buildings, it was made from granite rather than the limestone Sharina had seen along the seashore and in outcrops in the settlers' clearing. Flecks of mica and other glittering inclusions winked in the waning skyglow.

Roses and long-needle pines grew up the building's high facade; in many places their roots had levered off the ornamental moldings. Piles of richly-carved ashlars, some of them broken when they fell, lay against the front wall, blocking two of the entrances and almost the third nearest Sharina.

It was as good a covert as any. She patted the knife, then mounted the heaped stones to the opening at the very top of the corbelled arch. She climbed with all four limbs, holding rough-barked trunks for support while her toes found purchase in the carved faces of monkeys, lizards, and less identifiable creatures.

Another serpent head projected above the sharp peak. Sharina squirmed beneath it and into the darkness of the building's interior.

The piled debris was much steeper on this side. In order to keep from falling head-first, Sharina grabbed the notch which must ages ago have held a wooden doorframe. Carefully she swung her torso around and found footholds so that she could wait just below the opening with her knife ready. She opened her mouth wide so that her gasps wouldn't give her away.

Though the villagers would learn where she was as soon as one of them tried to crawl through this hole. They had to come at her one at a time unless they decided to pull down a mass of hard stones woven about by brambles and tree roots. That wouldn't be an easy job or a short one, even by daylight.

Neither would getting through the existing hole while Sharina waited with a knife that could whack through a wrist-thick sapling with a single stroke. She smiled with a dark humor. She hadn't asked them to become her enemies.

As Sharina's hammering pulse slowed, she heard her leading pursuers arrive. Voices, all of them male, were arguing in nervous, winded tones. She couldn't make out the words. They seemed to be some distance away still.

Deciding that being able to see her enemies was worth the risk, Sharina raised her eyes slowly over the lip of piled debris. Dim light and the pale stone of this city would confuse her outline even if one of the villagers was looking straight at the opening.

As she'd thought, her pursuers had halted at the gate pillars. They peered through the opening while trying to keep their distance from the serpent head. There were half a dozen young men and one fellow with a stone-gray beard and ridged muscles on his arms and bare thighs. More villagers arrived as Sharina watched.

The argument continued, obviously going nowhere. Each newcomer spoke; those already present answered in tones of increasing frustration. The light was failing.

The older man squatted with a flint knife and a handful of pithy canes he'd gathered from the margins of the boulevard. He arranged his fireset, then struck a quick blow to the end of a piston igniter. He spilled pressure-heated shavings onto the waiting punk and blew the glow to full life.

The warriors arrived along with their flunkies and at least a score of the settlement's women. Each warrior carried his own spear, but other men bore the helmets; they must've left the ox-hide shields by the palisade. Full battle armor was scarcely necessary for three men fighting a single woman.

The warriors donned their bronze helmets, adjusting the webs of leather straps that cushioned them on their skulls. The grizzled man rose with the pine knot he'd lighted, holding it away from his body as he eyed the opening where Sharina waited. She resisted the impulse to duck down: motion would give her away while the blur of her face would not.

The grizzled man smiled. He hadn't joined the conversation that circled among the rest of the villagers. If they came for her,
that
would be the man to watch out for. Though she suspected that he was far too canny a hunter to put himself at the point of the head-on assault that would certainly be the plan of his fellows.

One of the warriors strode forward. He shouted and thrust his spear through the archway, but he didn't—he carefully didn't—let his leading foot cross the line of where the gate would have been. Still blustering, the warrior backed away.

Sharina looked behind her. Her eyes had adapted enough to see that the room was empty except for a few stones fallen from the roof and a more general litter of the stucco that had once covered the interior surfaces. A crosswall with a post-and-lintel doorway separated the adjacent portion of the long structure. Presumably that was the room which the middle of the three outside doorways gave onto.

Voices rose again outside. Sharina raised her head cautiously. Villagers were trying to light crude torches from the burning pine knot which the grizzled man had butted in the ground. He seemed the only one present who was really comfortable in the woods. He watched in stony wonderment as his fellows tried to ignite fallen limbs that had decayed into soggy punk and lengths of sapling too green to burn in anything less than a roaring blaze.

The villagers started back the way they'd come. The warrior with the peacock plume shook his spear toward the ruins and bellowed in a thick accent, "Rot in Hell, dragonspawn!"

He turned and gave a curt order to the grizzled man. That fellow nodded and picked up the flaring pine knot. After a final long glance toward Sharina's hiding place, he started toward the settlement with the torch held high. He was lighting the way for the warriors, though they were going to be lucky not to fall on their faces unless they removed their helmets again.

The lights vanished quickly into the forest. Villagers complained as they stumbled into trees or thorns caught at them. Sharina was sure they'd given up, but she waited at the opening while the moon climbed higher by the width of two fingers at arm's length.

She sighed and sheathed the Pewle knife, then climbed down into the building. She was thirsty and she'd probably be very hungry in the morning, but she couldn't go exploring in the dark. At best she'd waste her time, and there was a good chance she'd manage to turn an ankle or worse.

The folk who'd settled the opposite headland feared the reptilian bird who'd carried her, they feared this place with its reptilian carvings, and they feared Sharina herself. In a more charitable mood Sharina might have said that she didn't blame them; but she did.

The interior door was a rectangle of light fainter than a will-o'-the-wisp. Sharina frowned. The glimpses of moonlight that penetrated the foliage barely outlined the opening by which she'd entered. Had the roof of one of the more distant rooms collapsed, leaving it open to the sky?

Sharina walked across gritty stucco toward the connecting door. She stepped carefully onto, then over, a stele that had tilted out of its wall niche and broken on the floor. The slab's back had been carved as well as the front.

She entered the central room. The light—and it was too faint to be called 'light' against anything but the absolute darkness framing it—came from the doorway on the other side. Against the room's back wall a statue of butter-smooth jade faced the outside doorway, now blocked by rubble. The carven figure stood twice Sharina's height: more than life sized, she supposed, but she couldn't be certain of that.

The statue was not of a man but rather of a scaly, man-shaped creature with pointed teeth in a long reptilian jaw. The eyes of rock crystal glittered at Sharina. In this light she couldn't be sure, but she suspected the rest of the figure had been shaped from a single block.

Dragonspawn
, she thought. She walked past. The statue wasn't trying to kill her, and the humans out there certainly were.

Bats didn't roost in the building's dry interior the way Sharina would have expected. She'd have smelled them even if they were already out hunting. The air did have a dry odor that she couldn't place; it wasn't a vegetable smell, but it might have come from the stone itself.

One of the interior doorposts had tilted slantwise across the opening. Sharina ducked under it and entered the third room.

The roof was whole, the outer doorway a solid mass of roots and rubble. The light—blue if it had any color—came from an alcove in the end wall of the building. Shapes moved in it, or seemed to.

Sharina stepped forward. She slid the Pewle knife out without consciously meaning to do so. As she got closer, she could see courses of tight, mortarless masonry behind the light. The alcove wasn't really there.