Servant of the Dragon (30 page)

Ilna looked forward as her fingers wove the disparate bits she'd gathered. Merota's hand were folded. She watched Ilna in silent concern. Chalcus, drawing back his oar with the ease of strength and practice, threw Ilna a familiar grin. None of the oarsmen under his immediate direction had stopped rowing.

Vonculo and the lookout muttered at the mast truck. After a moment the sailing master called, "All right, we'll put in here for the night!"

"There'll be no water!" a sailor called from the deck. "That's a sand spit that'll be under water by high tide."

"We'll be away before high tide!" Vonculo said as he shimmied down the stay backward. "By daylight we'll find a place with water. It's spend the night here or spend the night on a shoal, can't you see?"

The lookout and a sailor forward called directions to the helmsman. "Half stroke!" Vonculo said to the flautist as he returned to his place by Ilna.

To her he added, "Sister take Leser for a fool! Does he think we can sail through the East Shoals in darkness?"

"If they weren't fools, most of them," Ilna said without emphasis, "would they have followed you in this hare-brained nonsense?"

Vonculo scowled. "Maybe you're too fine a lady to care about gold," he said. "Men like us who've gone hungry are willing to take risks for wealth like we've been offered."

Ilna smiled with a mouth like a fishhook. "Here," she said, giving the sailing master the design she'd quickly plaited for him. "Hold it where there's enough light to see."

She didn't say that two children left orphaned at age seven in a rural hamlet knew about hunger. Her life was no business of Vonculo's, and he wouldn't understand anyway. Vonculo's sort thought that wealth was the magic balm that made all troubles go away. Even getting rich wouldn't make him see the truth: he'd just decide that
more
wealth was the answer, because what he'd gotten thus far didn't cure his ills.

"Give me the lamp, Tayguch," Vonculo said. The lantern hanging from the curved sternpost was a complex affair of wood with horn lenses. It drew air through twisting passages so that spray wouldn't douse the flame. The nearer sailor unhooked it and held it close to Ilna's weaving.

"I don't see—" Vonculo said; then he screamed. He flung the scrap of cloth and hair over the side, raising his other hand to shield his eyes.

Tayguch leaped back, the lantern swinging violently. He stepped on the flautist who jumped to his feet, losing the rhythm of his call. Oars clattered together and a sailor cried angrily.

"That's a lie!" Vonculo shouted. For a moment Ilna thought he might reach for his belt knife. Instead he glared at her and rubbed his palms fiercely on the railing as if to clean them of whatever might have clung from the little pattern they had held.

"Get away from me!" he said. "Get forward or go over the side, it's all one to me!"

The other trireme was coming alongside. A sailor stood in the bow with a brass speaking trumpet; sunset turned its bell into a fiery half-moon. "Hold up!" he called.

"Hold the oars!" Vonculo ordered. The flautist blew three long trills, but the rowers had already raised their oars. Ilna scrambled between the lines as quickly as dignity permitted, reaching her original location beside Merota.

"He asked you to tell his fortune, did he?" Chalcus said, grinning over his shoulder at the women. "What did you show him, mistress?"

Ilna shrugged. The girl's hands felt warm and sweaty in hers. "I have no idea," she said. "The pattern was his life, not mine."

Sailors shouted plans and objections to one another across the water separating the ships. At this rate the moon would be near zenith before they came to a decision.

"Ilna?" Merota asked. "Could you see your future if you wanted to?"

"In my experience, child," Ilna said, "the things that come are quite bad enough when they arrive. I don't see any reason to worry about them ahead of time as well."

Chalcus laughed. "Aye, child," he said. "But I think you'll find the future is worse for those who stand in her way."

"And your enemies, Chacus?" Merota asked unexpectedly. "What happens to them?"

The chanteyman looked at her. "Often enough they'd have been wiser to make me a friend, that's so," he said.

After a moment he laughed. He was still chuckling when the flute ordered them onto the looming islet for the night.

* * *

Sharina didn't have her brother's gusto for the classics, but she'd followed Reise's course of instruction as an intelligent student and a dutiful daughter. As she picked her way through the time-ravaged stonework, she tried to place it in the context of what she had read.

She couldn't. There were hints in Rigal's epic
The Wanderings of Dann
and shadowings in Almsdor's equally-ancient
The Birth of the Gods
. The sources contradicted each other—and in the case of Almsdor, contradicted himself. This palace, this ancient
city
, was older than myth itself.

But it was real.

Occasionally blocks had tumbled into her path, displaying squared features and intricate carvings to the moonlight, but they weren't a serious obstacle. The trees growing in what had been a plaza were the real barrier, and in some places Sharina found them almost impenetrable.

The buildings to either side of the boulevard were so overgrown that by daylight she wouldn't have been certain they were there except that hills weren't so regularly linear. The moon's white light slipped between the trunks to brilliantly illuminate the stones beneath. Sometimes the black rectangle of a doorway gaped; sometimes a face, stylized but recognizably reptilian, glared out at her.

Nothing remained of this place in Sharina's day. Nothing at all.

Historians—Herfa, Palatch the Hermit, and even some of the lyrics of Celondre—told how Lorcan the First founded the Kingdom of the Isles with the help of a great wizard from a pre-human reptilian race. All that was nearly a thousand years in the past even when Herfa began writing.

What sort of sources could Herfa and the others have used? The annals of great families, perhaps—written to glorify members of their own house. Temple records, cursory at best. Besides, for the most part the temple lists were transferred to stone from painted boards only when the originals had been copied many times by bored, careless scribes. Minstrels' tales, told to entertain rather than inform and embellished in whatever fashion the singer thought would earn him the highest pay.

And imagination. Sharina knew that the historians of the Old Kingdom had been human. Like other humans they generally preferred to invent explanations rather than admit they were ignorant.

None of what Sharina knew about King Lorcan was as trustworthy as the gossip about Lady Sharina that teamsters told in the taverns of Valles. The stories about Lorcan's inhuman companion had even less grounding than that.

But King Lorcan
had
existed: the Kingdom of the Isles proved he was real. It was easier to believe that a great wizard had aided Lorcan than it was to imagine that a minor noble on the island of Haft had arisen from chaos to unite the Isles
without
the help of wizardry. And while the Dragon might not be 'real' in the sense that Cashel was real to the touch, Sharina had certainly met someone in these ruins tonight.

She grinned. Perhaps the Dragon could dictate to her a true history of Lorcan and the founding of the Kingdom of the Isles. If she published such a work, however, the scholars of Valles and Erdin would dismiss her text as a naive attempt to euhemerize myth. Well, she wasn't cut out to be a historian.

Something hopped in front of her.
A mouse,
she thought, but its second hop took it into a patch of moonlight and she saw it was gray-mottled toad.

The air was full of insects—many of them mosquitoes with a taste for Sharina—and she'd seen lizards scurrying over the stones. There were no bats, and the birds she'd seen and heard in the surrounding woods didn't call within the compound.

Sharina had wondered why the settlers who'd pursued her had been unwilling to step through the gateway. To her the ruin seemed little different from the woods near Barca's Hamlet, but the feeling of discomfort that barred the villagers worked on other warm-blooded creatures as well.

The Dragon had welcomed Sharina. Almost certainly the creature that brought her to this place had been the Dragon's minion; but she'd given her oath to serve the Dragon, and even on reflection she didn't see that she'd had any better choice.

She wondered 'when' in the greater fabric of time the present was. The Dragon had said she was on Cordin—what would be Cordin. She'd seen the shark's head standard outside the raw settlement. Rigal spoke of the shark's head being the symbol of Cordin's first ruling dynasty.

But Rigal was alluding to events many millennia in his past, and he'd been dead for thousands of years when Sharina was born.
A myth of a myth....

She smiled. She might as well smile.

Sharina had started to climb over the rock in front of her before she realized this was the throne that the Dragon had sent her to find. It was of the same material as most of the city around it: light-colored granite, very fine-grained and hard.

The throne's back and arms were low and perfectly smooth instead of being chased with complex designs. The wide seat had been mortised into the block that formed the rest of the structure.

Sharina eyed it, then cut a length of rattan for a pry bar with two blows of the Pewle knife. She worked the end of the rattan into the back joint, then levered the seat forward enough to give her fingers a grip. Rootlets had found purchase between other, equally tightly-fitted stones, but the throne was as bare as the day the masons finished with it.

If masons and not wizards had formed it.

The seat slid forward like a drawer, moving easily despite its weight. Sharina left it in the grooves when she'd pulled it open far enough to remove the objects in the alcove beneath.

The material folded on top looked like cloth, but she felt the dry rustle beneath her fingers as she picked it up: it was a snakeskin. It had girdled a body as thick as Sharina's thigh, but it was only six feet long. No snake she knew of had those dimensions.

She held the skin to the moonlight. It was subtly mottled, but it had stretched when the snake cast it and the markings were faint anyway. Sharina couldn't tell anything from the pattern. She wasn't even certain there
was
a pattern.

Sharina wore her knife on a belt that had been cut for a stocky man. The belt's tongue was long enough to double Sharina's waist, but she hadn't been willing to trim the heavy leather to fit her more closely. Now she loosed the buckle. Twisting the skin lightly as though it were silk, she wrapped it twice around her waist and cinched the belt over it.

Her neighbors in Barca's Hamlet would have thought anyone dressed in a snakeskin had gone mad, but Sharina had seen fine ladies in Erdin and Valles wearing far more exotic garments. She grinned. Perhaps she'd return to the capital to start a new fashion.

Sharina reached into the hollow seat and brought out the other object: a plaque, slightly trapezoidal, and stamped from thin gold. There were holes at the four corners; Sharina guessed it was meant to be worn as a pectoral on a priest's breast.

Embossed on the metal was the head of a humanoid reptile: the Dragon or a member of the Dragon's race. Its jaws were open slightly, baring the pointed teeth in what could be either a smile or a snarl.

Around the plaque's border was a line of non-repeating symbols, sharply-incised wedges. At first glance Sharina took them for decoration, but closer appraisal suggested they might be writing. They were beyond her ability or that of any other human to translate, though, and she no longer had time for whimsy: the moon was nearing zenith.

Sharina pulled open the neck of her tunic and slid the plaque inside to nestle against her belly where the sash caught it. Gold is heavy, and even a thin sheet like this was a noticeable weight. In sheer metal value, the plaque was worth more than her father's inn.

She wormed through the stand of gnarled beech trees between her and the archway. Their roots had managed to find lodging between blocks of the pavement, but the meager nutrients available stunted them.

Sharina paused to catch her breath when she'd gotten past the beeches. Almost as an afterthought she looked around and realized that she'd reached her destination: a pillar rose from either side, leaning inward to meet above her in a corbelled arch.

The arch was of black stone unlike anything else in the city. Like the throne, its surfaces were unadorned. Vegetation brushed and shrouded it, but the roots and tendrils hadn't worked their way into the stone fabric.

Sharina placed herself between the pillars. Their shadow, black like the stone itself, pooled around her but a blur of light wavered in the center. She twisted to look straight overhead.

There was a small hole in the very top of the arch. Light channeled through the opening showed its raised stone lip was cross-hatched, or perhaps covered by the same wedge-shaped markings as the pectoral beneath Sharina's tunic.

Small though the opening was, the moon was in perfect alignment with it. The edge of the white disk blazed coldly through a tunnel of stone. In a moment it would—

The light tugged at her eyes. Once a mummer had brought his
camera obscura
to the Sheep Fair and amazed spectators by projecting an image of the world upside down onto the curtain behind him. Wizardry, he claimed, and the folk who watched—visiting merchants as well as locals—were willing for the most part to believe him.

Reise alone said that it was only a trick of the light streaming through the pinhole at one end of the box—marvelous, but no more wizard's work than a rainbow is. Sharina had taken her father's word for it—Reise was no more likely to lie than he was to dance naked in the street—but she'd thought even then that perhaps there was more magic in a rainbow than her father thought.

This arch was another
camera obscura
, only that. But the opening was toward the empty sky, and the images that it threw onto Sharina were—

She felt her body dissolving like salt in creek water. She was part of time, flowing through eternity: every rock, every tree, every living thing was Sharina os-Reise, and she was all of them. The cosmos shone as a brilliant tapestry about her. Momentarily she wondered if this was how Ilna always viewed the world—

But it couldn't be, because this was perfect beauty. The world in which Ilna lived was a bleak expanse of misery and desperation. Sharina knew her friend too well to doubt that; and now, seeing
this
cosmos, she pitied Ilna as well. Everyone chose her own life....

Existence slowed. Time had no duration in Sharina's eternal present, but she could feel boundaries closing about her.

She was standing. For a moment she thought she'd gone blind, but that was because she was seeing with the eyes of her body alone instead of
being
all the cosmos.

It was late in the afternoon, and the air was warmer than that of the ruin Sharina had left. Beyond the mouth of the alley in which she stood were buildings, two stories high and three, in which people wearing kilts and light wrappers went about their ordinary business.

A man walking past the alley mouth saw Sharina and frowned, lengthening his pace. He didn't seem surprised, just mildly disapproving.

Sharina was shaking. She couldn't remember any clear image from the transition that brought her here, but lack of that oneness with eternity gnawed her soul like a cancer. She had been... she'd been everything! And now....

Sharina squatted and lowered her head, forcing herself to breathe deeply. After a moment her body's shuddering stopped and she could straighten up, feeling embarrassed at her reaction. Though perhaps—

When a man is rescued from drowning, he gasps and splutters on the shore. Sharina knew she'd been drowning also, submerged and dissolving in the flow of eternity.

More pedestrians crossed the alley mouth, some of them glancing in her direction. Their chatter and the street cries were no different than she'd heard often when walking through Valles. Though the speakers used a dialect broader than Sharina was used to, she could generally understand the words.

She looked at herself and decided to hang the big knife over one shoulder so that her cape would conceal it; the folk in the street didn't go armed. The pectoral was a heavy presence within her tunic. Taking another deep breath, Sharina prepared to go out.

It was only then that she noticed the side of the building to her left. It had been plastered but not recently, and some of the coating had flaked off. The wall beneath was built from the inscribed blocks of the city where Sharina had met the Dragon.