Servant of the Dragon (59 page)

"Colva!" Liane cried in a clear voice. "Come back!"

Garric tried to glance over his shoulder, but to see past the cheekpiece of his helmet he had to lean back and twist at the waist. Colva slipped by, moving toward the melee.

Garric grabbed the woman with his left hand. She turned and looked at him with a transfigured expression, then shrugged free. She seemed to have no more skeleton than a stream of water.

The dying mammoth strode through the shouting, stabbing troops who were no more hindrance to a creature of its size than a thicket of blackberries. A sweep of its curving tusks flung ranks of tight-packed troops sideways. Its trunk was curled high against its forehead.

Colva stood with her face lifted and her hands spread at her sides. There was now nothing between her and the mammoth.

Garric stepped forward, shouldering the woman aside. He didn't think about what he was doing: it was the sort of thing you don't do if you think about it.

The tusks spread to either side of him. He swung his sword in a vertical stroke. The tip of his blade severed the mammoth's trunk and sliced deep into the spongy frontal bone. Noxious black fluid sprayed from the great blood vessels that fed the trunk.

The mammoth paced onward, shoving Garric back. His heel turned on the arm of a fallen soldier. He stopped trying to free the sword and grabbed the tusks with both arms.

The mammoth lowered its head to crush him. One of its eyesockets was empty; the other stared at the man between the tusks with no more emotion than a stone. The stub of the trunk twitched; had the appendage been whole, the beast would have shoved Garric to the ground and knelt on him. Now it could only splash him with its last dribble of reliquified blood.

The eye glazed. The mammoth sagged forward, dead again and finally at peace. Garric shoved himself clear of the toppling ruin. He thought he'd lost his sword—it wouldn't be hard to replace it on this field of carnage—but the beast rolled over on its left side with the hilt sticking out. Garric sawed the blade up and down like a pump handle, then drew it free.

The battle was over. The Yole squadrons had been slaughtered to a man. Except they hadn't been men any more....

Liane held Colva from behind, twisting her arms. Liane's face was as blank as a cobblestone—and despite that control, utterly furious.

"I'm so sorry," Colva said in a liquid voice, as though she were in the throes of passion. "The powers drew me. Such powers are loose here!"

Garric was drenched in the fluids of a beast dead a thousand years and surrounded by corpses,
his
men some of them as well as the dead of the ancient past. He looked into Colva's expressive eyes and felt queasy.

A Blood Eagle officer glanced from the two women to Garric and mimed a question. "Hold her!" Garric said. "Not Liane, the other one. Just...."

Garric turned away. "Just hold her, keep her out of the way," he added as he almost fell; from reaction to the battle, he supposed. And from what he thought he'd seen in Colva's eyes.

Liane touched Garric's shoulder. That steadied him even more than the hand he dabbed down to the ground.

The three necromancers were climbing down a ladder leaned against the arch. They moved as if they themselves were the walking dead. Great wizardry was as draining as great age.

Garric pointed his sword. "Get them!" he shouted. "
Kill
them!"

Because as long as they lived, they were dangerous.

The empty despair Garric had seen in the mammoth's single eye had eliminated any possibility he'd grant mercy to the wizards responsible. No doubt they were responsible for worse; but
that
Garric had seen.

He started forward. At first he had to climb over mounded corpses, but the dead weren't the barrier on the flanks that they presented to the center of the royal army.

Beyond the line of slaughter, broken pavement made the footing dangerous. Garric ran anyway, bouncing from one tilted block to the next with no more hesitation than a squirrel leaping between trees.

The trio of necromancers had knocked over their brazier when they fled; a faint haze spread from the top of the arch. A new column of smoke, thick and formed by alternate streams of black and white, twisted skyward from the palace roof.

Garric knew he'd be a wobbling wreck when he tumbled down from his present emotional heights—but that would be later. For now he had to get to the palace.

Officers were sorting out the phalanx. Its ranks had been badly disordered by victory—though not nearly as badly as they'd have been by defeat. Those troops couldn't pursue the necromancers anyway unless they flung down their long pikes.

The Blood Eagles and regular infantry were almost as heavily burdened. Those who heard Garric's order clumped off in pursuit of the wizards, but they weren't likely to catch the trio before it reached the palace.

The skirmishers, those who'd survived the mindless courage of the Yole charge, sprinted forward through the ranks of their heavy-armed fellows. If Garric sprang like a squirrel, the skirmishers were a nest of hornets flying past him for their revenge.

The three leading skirmishers reached the wizards while Garric was still twenty yards behind. They'd used up their javelins, but they still had the short hatchets that small-holders in the east of Ornifal used for farm tasks.

The necromancer in white turned and extended his hands toward the soldiers. The nearest man sank his hatchet to the helve in the wizard's face. The pair wearing black managed another step each before quick strokes severed their spines.

"Your majesty, wait!" Attaper gasped. "By the Lady, your majesty!"

Garric glanced sideways. The Blood Eagles' commander had thrown down his shield and helmet; now he was struggling with the side-laces of his gilded breastplate. A score of his men were following closely, one of them even carrying a spear.

"May the Sister take you, your majesty!" Attaper cried. He flung his elaborate breastplate away with a clang and at last drew level with the far-younger prince.

"Not the palace door,"
King Carus warned. During the moments Garric faced the mammoth, Carus had been as much in control of Garric's actions as the youth himself was, but now the ancient king had slipped back to his usual presence in the back of Garric's mind.
"Up the outside stairs to the roof!"

The dead necromancers lay like castoff clothing. The white-painted hand protruding from one's sleeve was as thin as an articulated skeleton. The power these wizards controlled had worn them away like steel on a grindstone; soon there would've been nothing left. Garric's attack had speeded their doom only slightly.

But that slight difference might be enough to save the world the wizards would have brought down with them.

"Take the stair tower!" Garric said, pointing with the sword still bare in his hand. He'd even wiped the blade, though he didn't remember doing it. Some reflex of Carus', he supposed. "The door from the inside'll be barred!"

The alabaster screen was an effective barrier against citizens who tried to push closer to their ruler. It wouldn't stop soldiers in a hurry.

Garric wasn't the first to the spiral staircase. The javelin men were ready for further work now that they'd run down the necromancers. More than a score of them raced ahead of Garric's pointing blade. Some had even picked up missiles from the volleys thrown into the beginnings of the Yole charge.

The reanimated corpses began to decay as soon as life left them again. Carus, glancing over the battlefield through Garric's eyes, wore a puzzled frown. His memory was full of similar scenes, but always the birds had settled by now: vultures and eagles, crows; and especially, since no part of the Isles was far from the sea, the gulls with their great, hooked beaks.

Klestis was a city of the dead. Only coarse plants and a few insects survived in what the necromancers had made of Ansalem's paradise.

Garric ran up the stairs, taking three of the low steps with each stride. He couldn't do this forever, but he wouldn't have to. They didn't have forever, Garric or the Isles either one.

As Garric climbed, he glanced out over Klestis through the serpentine stone pillars. It was just as he'd seen when Ansalem called him here in dreams, except that now the Royal Army was advancing in ordered battalions over the bodies strewn across the plaza. Lord Waldron was doing his job as army commander.

Prince Garric of Haft was doing his job also, one that he alone of those present knew enough to perform.

Liane watched from the plaza, waving her white silk scarf. That was a change from Garric's dreams also, one worth any number of soldiers to him now.

The bridge from Valles touched the curtain of light by which Ansalem had separated Klestis from the rest of the universe. That was familiar—

But instead of a single bridge, an infinite number of spans overlay one another all around the barrier's circuit. The surviving necromancers were opening other passages to Klestis, and from Klestis to the Isles.

With Attaper somehow still on his heels and more of the Blood Eagles behind, Garric ran onto the roof garden. The javelin men hadn't bothered to lift a planter for a battering ram. They were hacking at the soft alabaster with their hatchets, eating a hole in the pierced stone big enough for men.

A brazier carved from dolomite in the shape of a dragon's maw stood in the center of Ansalem's chamber. Smoke spewed from its mouth and filtered through the screen, then reformed into a single strand above.

Tenoctris lay in frozen silence on the bier where Ansalem rested in the dreamworld. At her head stood a necromancer dressed in white. Beneath the paint Garric recognized a thin, terrified face from the band of acolytes Carus had met in Ansalem's palace. She held a dagger above Tenoctris' throat, ready to slash when the order came.

The figure at the foot of the bier was Purlio. His left side was black, his right was white.

In Purlio's hands was the fossilized ammonite. Evil pulsed from the gleaming marcasite shell. The chamber wavered from its place in the cosmos as Purlio mouthed an incantation.

"Stop them!" Garric shouted. He kicked his right heel into the screen. Weakened stone flew inward, leaving a hole as big as a man's head.

Blood Eagles shouted, following Garric's lead to hammer the alabaster with their hobnails. Several of the light troops continued chopping at the screen, though by now their hatchets were more danger than benefit.

The wizard in white dropped her dagger and stumbled away. Purlio shouted a word of power in a terrible voice. He lifted the marcasite fossil against his face.

There was a flash of red as deep as sunset on a dying world. The shell—the Great One—merged with Purlio's flesh to rest on his shoulders in place of his skull. Hazy tentacles wobbled from the opening just as fleshy ones had done in life.

Soldiers threw down their weapons and scrambled away. Attaper shouted, "Forward! Forward!" and banged his sword hilt on the alabaster, but even he was blind with horror at what he'd seen.

The fleeing wizard turned and looked at her former leader. She started to scream. The Great One's arms wrapped her head and drew her against the parrot-like beak. Bone crunched repeatedly before the screaming stopped.

Garric jumped against the screen, this time hitting with both feet. A section the size of a palace door toppled inward, shattering into a thousand creamy fragments.

Purlio turned, staring at Garric through the ammonite's eyes. Its pupils were curved slits. The dead wizard lay on her back; her face had been chewed away. The Great One's tentacles were now blood-red muscle.

Garric swung his sword in a slanting arc. Purlio became a sparkle of scarlet light. It swirled and vanished as the bright steel snicked through it.

The air was empty.

Tenoctris stirred on the stone couch like a sparrow awakening. Garric slumped to his knees. He let the sword slip from his nerveless fingers and clutched the bier for support.

"By the Lady!" cried a soldier outside on the roof. "There's armies coming across all those bridges! By the Lady! there's a million soldiers coming at us and they're all dead!"

* * *

"Behold the Palace of Landure, sheep-boy," said the ring demon. In a half-wondering tone he added, "We've arrived. I really didn't think we would."

"It wasn't so bad," Cashel said truthfully. "With you to help me, I mean."

The structure was set into—cut into—the face of a bluff like the one which had opened every stage of Cashel's journey through the Underworld. In front was a porch with four stone pillars carved to look like palm trees. The bases were one color, the uplifted fronds forming the capital another, and the shafts were painted in contrasting stripes—though Cashel couldn't guess what any of the colors would've been under a real sun.

The blue light here was cold. It made the building look like a tomb.

Instead of a wooden or metal panel, a curtain of silver beads fell across the doorway. They shimmered as the slight breeze stirred them. Cashel couldn't read the pattern of their motions, but he knew there was one.

"I guess I'll go on in," Cashel said. "Unless there's something else I ought to do, Master Krias?"

"Nothing at all, sheep-boy," the ring said. "All you have to do is go inside and place the wafer where I tell you; then you're done. You're free."

"Right," said Cashel, striding toward the porch. There was more in the demon's voice than the words themselves, but Cashel couldn't figure out what. Life would be a lot simpler if people just said what they meant; but generally they didn't, and he'd learned a long time ago that it didn't help if he asked them slap out what they really wanted.

Sheep would likely be just as bad if they could talk. Thankfully, they couldn't.

As he pushed the curtain aside with his outstretched left hand, Cashel heard a chord from the distance behind him mingle with the silver beads' tinkling. Elfin was out there somewhere still. Cashel grimaced, though Elfin's problems weren't Cashel's doing; or at least not much.

White light from no visible source flooded the long, shallow room beyond the curtain. Cashel touched his quarterstaff to the floor to see which way the shadow fell. There wasn't a shadow, from the hickory or from his own body either.

The ceiling was high by peasant standards, but not exceptional for the palaces Cashel had seen since he left home; he could've touched it with his staff if he'd wanted to. He couldn't tell how far it stretched to right and left, though. If not forever, then certainly beyond the range of Cashel's own keen eyesight. The inner wall was painted with a mural of Landure in an endless series of occupations.

"Turn right," Krias said sourly. "It isn't far."

"Wow," said Cashel as he walked slowly down the passageway. When he looked closer, he saw there wasn't a lot of variety in what Landure was doing, though the settings changed. The wizard's sword struck down a winged creature that would've been a bat if it hadn't been bigger than a plow ox; the wizard held out his clenched fist so his sapphire ring could incinerate men the size of voles who swarmed out of rocky soil; the wizard stood on a beach, driving shark-headed creatures back into the sea; the wizard—

"Didn't Landure do anything but fight, Master Krias?" Cashel asked.

"Once he died, sheep-boy," the demon said. "As I recall, you were present when it happened."

They'd come to a scene of Landure seated on a throne of light. The artist had made Landure's grim expression look regal rather than merely peevish. Before him, bowing so deeply they rubbed their foreheads on the ground, were the front rows of an assembly stretching widely to right and left.

The assembly was of monsters: half-men and non-men, slender folk Cashel recognized as the People who'd have devoured him, creatures with insect antennae and faceted insect eyes, giants and dwarfs and all manner of differing unpleasantness. Those disappearing into the distance on either side were still shown precisely. Cashel was sure that he could have told their expressions apart if he had a magnifying crystal to examine the painting with.

Landure's image glared outward, making Cashel a member of the obsequious crowd. Cashel's right hand squeezed his staff a little tighter.

Cashel was generally pretty easy going—he was too big and strong to be anything else if he was going to live around decent people. Even as a painting, though, Landure sure knew how to get his back up.

"Well, what're you waiting for, sheep-boy?" Krias demanded shrilly. "You said you wanted to be free, didn't you? Put the life under Landure's tongue in the picture and your job's done!"

"Ah," said Cashel. People were always and forever getting mad because Cashel hadn't known to do things they hadn't bothered to tell him in a way he understood. That was mostly because they were impatient, he supposed; or because they were just folks who liked to get mad.

He reached into his wallet, rummaging past the plum-sized fruit he'd brought from the tree, and brought out the crystal wafer. It gleamed like a rainbow in the hall's shadowless illumination.

Cashel looked at his ring; Krias was barely a spark in the heart of the purple sapphire. He raised the wafer to the mouth of the painted Landure and found it slipped easily into—

What was no longer a wall, but rather the man himself stepping forward imperiously to snarl, "Who are you and what are you doing here?"

Cashel stepped back. The painted throne was empty. "I'm Cashel or-Kenset—" he said.

"He's the fellow returning the life you lost, master," Krias said. "Or hadn't you noticed?"

"Silence!" the wizard said. "I see I could die of old age if I waited for a peasant to tell me what I need to know."

Symbols and words were set into the mosaic floor already. Landure undid his shoulder cape's gold clasp—it was fashioned to look like a leech humping toward his throat—and knelt.
"Sukk kala bowe,
" he muttered, using the pin as a wand.
"Badawa balaha war-ry."

Cashel stood silently with the staff vertical at his side. His skin prickled; it always did around wizardry. For choice he'd have planted the staff square in front of him, but he guessed that'd look hostile.

He
felt
hostile, that was no lie. Landure the Guardian wasn't wearing any better the second time than he had the first, but there wasn't any help for that.

"
Risauda
!" the wizard cried as he struck his pin at the center of the mosaic pentacle before him. Lights whirled in the air. Sometimes Cashel thought he saw figures, but it was all spinning too fast for him to focus.

Landure stood up. For a moment he seemed a little shaky from the incantation, but he was too mad for that to delay him long. "So, peasant, you killed me!"

"Yes sir, I did," Cashel said. He didn't raise his voice, he didn't try to explain what the wizard must already know; and especially, he didn't flinch away from Landure's angry gaze.

Landure didn't flinch either, but his tone was a bit more reasonable when he continued, "I see you brought my ring back. Where's my sword?"

Cashel twisted the ring one way, then the other, and drew it over his knuckle. The gold circuit was as tight on his little finger as you could have and be comfortable.

"Here's Krias," he said, handing the ring to the wizard. "He's been a big help to me. As for your sword, I left it where it lay. I don't have anything to do with swords."

"Except occasionally to kill fools who try to use them on him," piped the ring demon. "Fools whose faithful servant has tried to warn them."

Landure gave the ring a fierce look as he slipped it onto the middle finger of his left hand. With it in place his gaze returned to Cashel.

"I suppose you know what you've done?" the wizard said. He pinned his cape back in place. "Besides letting Colva loose, I mean? There's a flood of demon-souls entering the waking world to animate the armies a necromancer is raising!"

"I didn't know that," Cashel said calmly. He was taller than Landure, stronger than three Landures put together—

And if it came to that, he'd killed Landure once. The wizard was mad and sure, he had reason to be; but he wasn't going to back Cashel down, no matter what he said or tried.

"The souls would be entering the waking world anyway," Krias said. "The necromancers are using the Dragon's body as a talisman."

"I could have stopped—" Landure said.

"You could have stood against the Dragon, master?" shrilled the ring demon. "You, who couldn't keep a
peasant
from knocking your fool head in? My, you've come back to life as Landure the Court Jester, I see!"

The wizard's face went red. For a moment Cashel thought he was going to shout a curse—a real curse, not the sort of thing you said when a skittish ox trod on your foot during yoking.

Instead, Landure took a deep breath and settled back. "I could have driven some of them back," he said softly, "but there's no point in talking about that now. There's much to be done, and I'll need my sword to do it."

"Tell him why you came to him, sheep-boy!" Krias said. "Or do you just want to waste your trip?"

"What?" said Landure. A touch of the usual choler was back in his voice.

"I'm looking for my friend Sharina," Cashel said, feeling his face get warm. "Tenoctris said that you might be able to help me. She said finding Sharina is maybe important. I mean, not just for me."

Landure frowned. "Tenoctris of Guelf?" he said. "I've heard of her, but I don't see what...."

He shrugged. "Anyway," he said, "I don't have time. You can come with me to the surface and I'll send you home from there."

"He doesn't want to go to the surface," Krias said unexpectedly. "He wants to go to the Chasm and cross it to where the girl is."

"He can't cross the Chasm!" Landure said. He held his hand out as he spoke to the ring.

"He can with help, as you—"

"Demon, shall I lock you in a cliff of basalt that will stand till time stops?"
the wizard shouted.
"This fool of a peasant killed me and loosed monsters on his own world!"

"You died not because this
man
didn't listen," said the ring demon, "but because you didn't explain. And you live now, master, because this
man
made a journey that not one in a thousand would even have attempted!"

"Look," Cashel said with dry lips. "If you'll point me to this Chasm, Master Krias, I'll take care of the rest myself. I don't need help from folks who're too busy to give it."

Landure bunched his ring hand into a fist. "I don't need lectures on duty from servants!" he said. "Or from a peasant either!"

"You need them from somebody," Krias said. "And as for servants—I've stopped serving you, Landure the Guardian. Now that I've seen how a man behaves, I'm going to do the same from now on. Even if you boil me in amber, the way you threatened before!"

Landure blinked. He cocked his head like he was hearing voices that Cashel couldn't. The anger went out of him and he slid the ring from his finger.

"Here," he said, handing it to Cashel. "I owe you this for returning me to life. The demon Krias will guide and protect you, wherever your way may lead."

Cashel worked the ring onto his finger again. It felt good. Landure glared at the sapphire and added, "Krias knows he'll suffer the consequences if he fails you."

"I'm not afraid of your consequences!" Krias said. Cashel didn't believe Krias, exactly; but he
did
take him for a fellow who'd do what he'd said even though it flat terrified him. "As for helping Master Cashel, why, that'll be a pleasure. You can't imagine what a change it is, Landure, to be the companion of a real man."

Krias snickered. "Of course, he's a really
stupid
man as well," he added, "but that's all right."

Cashel laughed. He said to the fuming wizard, "I was afraid something'd happened to the Krias I knew, but now I see it's still him."

He rapped his staff on the floor to close the previous discussion. "Master Krias?" he said formally. "Where do we go now?"

Landure himself pointed down the hall in the direction they'd been travelling. "You'll find it fifty yards that way," the wizard said. He correctly read the doubt in Cashel's expression and added, "Let's say the height of a tall tree, if that helps you more."

"I'll tell you when we get there, sheep-boy," the demon said. "Just start walking."

Cashel bowed to Landure and walked away. The wizard was frowning. Not with anger this time, but apparently out of puzzlement.

Cashel grinned. He supposed he and Krias made a pretty funny pair at that. The grin faded as he wondered how Sharina would take to the little fellow. Still, most everybody got along with Sharina.

The scenes painted on the wall were more of the same: Landure laying down the law, which mostly meant Landure driving all manner of monsters where he wanted them, and slaughtering them if they didn't move fast enough to please him.

Cashel frowned, but he knew there were folk you pretty well
had
to treat that way. The People, if it came to that. Being polite to them hadn't got Cashel anything more than the chance to be the main dish at dinner....

"I guess I see how your Landure gets, ah, short tempered," Cashel said to the ring.