Servant of the Dragon (62 page)

Ilna stood close by like a grimfaced statue with cords in her hands; at her side was a young girl holding a rock. Near them a smiling man poised with his sword, curved like a scorpion's sting, in mid-stroke. Ruby light played around Ilna and her companions.

The swordstroke was aimed at a wizard whose robes were half black and half white; the marcasite fossil of an ammonite took the place of his head.

The Great One turned to stare at Sharina. The beast eyes within its mantle were yellow-green with slitted, S-curved pupils. The beak opened in a rasping cry. The human arms didn't move, but the tentacles quivered in a complex pattern. Sharina swung her knife—

Cashel thrust his staff—

Dalar's weights spun in accelerating circles—

Garric's sword cut in a long arc—

Spears, swords and hatchets struck toward a figure that had once been human but was no more. Sharina felt a freezing lethargy of red light.

Ilna, relaxed from her restraint, drew a knot tight. The swordsman with her brought his weapon down and the girl half threw, half pushed her rock toward the necromancer.

The necromancer dissolved downward, inward with a scream both soundless and more intense than a living entity could grasp. The curved sword cut only air. Instants later other weapons clashed in the same empty space, Sharina's among them.

They were back in Ansalem's palace. Everyone was shouting. Tenoctris tried to gasp an explanation that the others were too excited to hear.

The necromancer was gone, but the mummy glared at Sharina across the brazier. She sheathed the Pewle knife and lifted the brazier by one tripod leg. She kicked the mummy onto the floor. The linen powdered at her touch, but the dry, scaly flesh beneath was firm. The mummy winked at her; that must have been a trick of the light.

Sharina dumped the blazing coals onto the Dragon's chest and belly. She jumped back quickly, but even so the fire bursting from a body impregnated with natron and cedar resins was so sudden that it singed the fine hairs off her right arm. Cashel snatched her away.

The flames billowed upward, mushrooming on the ceiling of Ansalem's chamber. "Out!" Garric ordered in a voice like a tree falling. "Out of here fast!"

Cashel put Sharina over his shoulder despite her cry and Dalar's cluck of protest. Two soldiers carried Tenoctris while Garric stood between the old wizard and the sudden conflagration. Instead of waiting for them to get through the existing hole, Cashel kicked the weakened screen. A piece flew outward.

Cashel paused as a further block of pierced alabaster the size of a tabletop wobbled, then decided to fall inward. He walked through without having to duck and deposited Sharina back on her feet.

The solid portion of the chamber's roof crumbled, eaten through by fire with a more than natural power. For a moment flames roared in windblown tendrils through the hole they'd burned; then the gout expanded into a figure thirty feet tall with a long, reptilian jaw.

"You have served me well, Sharina os-Reise!" said the Dragon. The figure of fire stretched out a three-fingered hand and swept the horizon. As the hand moved, the armies of the dead exploded like thistledown in a bonfire. Black smoke spewed from the cataclysm, then was sucked away. The bridges remained, delicate traceries of wizardlight, but the fire had scoured them bare of all life or once-life.

The Dragon continued turning until his gesture had covered and cleansed the horizon. Some of Garric's soldiers flinched as the flaming arm pointed past their heads, but Sharina felt nothing save the prickling of nearness to great power.

The Dragon rocked with hissing laughter and leaped skyward. His flaming figure expanded, swelling until it splashed against the dome of light sealing Klestis out of time.

Fire spread across the wizardlight, merged—and vanished in a thunderclap. For long moments the echoes rolled across Klestis. They finally ceased, and there was no sound at all.

"We've won," said Garric. He sounded too exhausted to care.

"No," said Tenoctris. She strained, but only when Cashel caught her around the body was she able to rise. "No, Garric, I'm sorry, but we haven't won. Purlio has gone to a place no one living can follow, and the bridge...."

She pointed to the horizon. Sharina's eyes followed the gesture. She didn't know how Tenoctris could pick one bridge out of the apparent thousands which linked Klestis to other planes of existence, but neither did she doubt that beyond
that
span was Valles and Sharina's own time.

"The bridge remains, and so do all the certain dangers I described before," Tenoctris said. "The necromancers didn't create the bridge. So long as it remains, Purlio or something worse than Purlio will use it again; and again; and forever, until we fail and evil triumphs. Only Ansalem can remove the threat, and we can't reach Ansalem in the cyst Purlio formed around him."

"But Sharina and I
saw
Ansalem," Dalar said. "Only a moment ago."

Men who'd been involved in their own tasks and fears stared at the bird, some of them seeing him for the first time. A Blood Eagle raised his spear; Attaper rang a hard hand off the man's helmet to control him.

"You must have seen him at the moment the necromancers formed their cyst," Tenoctris said. "Only the amphisbaena, the double-headed serpent, can open it; and the amphisbaena is enclosed with Ansalem."

"Oh," said Sharina. She unwrapped the snakeskin which she'd been given in the ruins of the Dragon's palace. "I think this may be—"

Tenoctris' cry of delight cut off the rest of Sharina's words.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Garric wanted to sleep, but he was too tired. He listened to Tenoctris while he focused his eyes on the sword he was sharpening with the small hand-stone from his belt. When the emotions burned out of his blood and his mind reformed from the shards of battle flickering through it in no particular order, then he might be able to sleep.

"When I'm myself again...," Tenoctris said. She managed a weak smile. Liane sat on one side of her with Sharina on the other. Cashel squatted behind the old wizard like a boulder.

"Such as that is, of course," Tenoctris continued, "I can at least try to unlock the place where Ansalem sleeps. I can't do anything about Purlio, though. He may not return to our time or any time for thousands of years, but we can't stop him from returning when he chooses to. When
it
chooses to, I should rather say."

Garric had sent Waldron and the bulk of the army back to Valles. Casualties had been light.

"Amazingly light,"
agreed Carus.
"Wizards are dangerous in their own way, but may we always be so lucky that the armies we fight have wizards for generals."

The ghost in Garric's mind looked drained, though King Carus had no physical body to tire in the running, slashing chaos. Battle wears on more than muscles; and perhaps muscles least of all.

Garric and the remainder of his forces—the Blood Eagles and a company of javelin men, to honor the light troops for their initiative in dealing with the wizards—were camped in the overgrown medians of Klestis' boulevards. Garric didn't see need for any troops at all, but Attaper wouldn't have obeyed an order to take his unit back across the bridge, and for a change Waldron would've agreed wholeheartedly with his rival.

Garric and his friends still had work to do in Klestis.

"You sent me to Landure," said Cashel in his usual slow rumble. "If you send me to where this Purlio is, I'll put him a place he won't come back from."

Except for the perimeter guards, tents covered the soldiers in Klestis. The red dome over the city was harmless, but its light worked on men's nerves. Garric had thought of retreating to Valles until Tenoctris was strong enough for the incantation... but that would mean crossing the bridge twice, which would probably be worse for all concerned.

Garric's lips smiled. Himself included.

"Kill him, you mean," Tenoctris said with a touch of irritation. They were all exhausted, but the old wizard had been through more than the rest of them. "Purlio is
already
dead. Purlio died the moment he surrendered to the Great One, though I suppose he thought that was a last chance to save himself. But because he's dead, he's safe from those who live."

"With respect to your wisdom, mistress...," said Ilna's new friend. His name was Chalcus, and he was a sailor.

"
A sailor
?" King Carus snorted.
"Then I was a jockey because I sometimes rode a horse!"

Chalcus squatted along one wall of the tent, with Ilna nearby and the child they'd appeared with sleeping between them. The girl—a niece of Lord Tadai, apparently—had absolutely refused to be separated from her companions, even though that meant staying in Klestis because Ilna had decided she was going 'to see the business out'.

Whatever
that
meant to Ilna's chill, knife-edged mind.

"But it's been my experience that men are much less trouble to me after they're dead than before," Chalcus went on. "If your wizard is dead, then so much the better."

"It's dead," Tenoctris said. Her voice sounded particularly reedy following Chalcus' honeyed tones. "Unfortunately it isn't a man. It's a thing that hasn't been alive as we understand it in more ages than you have years, Master Chalcus; but so long as it has a connection to our world, we'll never be safe from it."

Garric had soaked his whetstone in whale oil to float the particles of steel from its surface as he drew it along his sword edge, one side and then the other. He'd cut into the root of a tusk when he severed the mammoth's trunk; ivory had nicked the metal.

The rhythmic scritch of stone on steel settled Garric's mind as little else could have done. A simple, precise task, repeated over and over. It was calming, even soporific.

A three-wick lamp hung from the tent's ridgepole. The light barely illuminated the faces of those within, but it served to conceal the red glow leaking through the seams. The troops had built bonfires, feeding them with brush cut from plantings that had become thickets, but they'd quickly found that firelight alone wasn't sufficient protection from the scarlet miasma. Leather tent walls and a lamp made it possible—almost—to imagine you were back in the waking world.

Garric let his eyes close. He tried to put the whetstone away, but after fumbling twice—more?—he let it slip to the rank grass. He wiped grit and excess oil from the blade with a rag that had come from the tunic of a soldier now dead, then sheathed the sword with an instinct gained from King Carus. Even if the king had been beheaded, his hands could have placed his blade where it needed to be.

The nearby conversation dulled to a buzz. Liane spoke. Garric's lips smiled in reaction, but the words didn't reach his conscious mind through the interwoven layers of fatigue.

He was vaguely aware of his friends rising and filing out of the tent. Liane was the last, and she carried the lamp with her.

Garric dreamed. He was in a deep forest. A storm rose, bending the trees and wrenching leaves, but the wind and rain were a protection. The fear that lay over Garric lessened during the violence. Lessened, though it never quite vanished.

The clouds cleared away. Stars in constellations that Garric didn't recognize glared down on him. There was a place that Garric knew he should be, but he couldn't remember where; and anyway, he couldn't move. He was a stone figure lying under an oak.

The moon rose. Garric thought the leafy branches would shield him, but light passed through as though the oak were transparent.

Tendrils from the moon's cold smile bathed Garric. His stone body began to crumble like gypsum in a furnace. Bits dissolved into powder and leaked into the ground. He watched and marveled as his form lost definition; became a mound, then merely a ripple, and finally merged with the grass as if he never were.

The moon leaned down from the sky. It kissed the soil where once Garric had lain. Garric slipped through a barrier of light as chill as the dust between the stars. He felt nothing except the cold.

"Colva!" someone shouted in a world where Garric no longer had a place. He wanted to speak, but he didn't exist.

There was nothing but the cold.

* * *

Ilna ran the ivory comb through Merota's hair, taking only the width of a few teeth at each pass. The child's hair—and Ilna's—had gotten filthy during the days since the mutiny. Army soap was harsh, and Ilna hadn't waited for the brushwood fire to more than take the chill off the firkin of pond water, but the two of them were clean again. Grooming, the next project, was well in hand thanks to a comb borrowed from an officer.

"Will Uncle Tadai send me back to Erdin, now, Ilna?" Merota said in a small voice.

"I'm not a fortune teller!" Ilna said before she thought about the question Merota was
really
asking; then she winced. The child hadn't complained at the fiery soap or the spurge bushes Ilna had used because she didn't have a proper loofa. The child hadn't complained about
anything
during all the time Ilna had known her.

"I'm not a fortune teller," Ilna repeated mildly, "but I don't expect you to be sent to Erdin to be married off, no. Because I won't let that happen. Unless you want it to."

Merota twisted and hugged herself against Ilna's shoulder. "I don't want it to," she said. She was crying. "I don't. I never did."

Knucklebones rattled in the adjacent tent. The chanteyman's familiar voice cried, "The Lady! See how She forgives Her erring worshipper? Now, which of you fine soldiers will pay to prove that I can't make my point again?"

Cashel was sleeping the sleep of the just across the far end of the eight-man squad tent he shared with Ilna and the child. One of the soldiers pitching the tent had asked—innocently, Ilna now assumed—if the third blanket-roll was for Chalcus. Ilna had come closer to throttling the fellow with her noose than he probably realized—but he did realize, babbling apologies as he backed away, that the suggestion hadn't been a welcome one.

She sniffed. She was Ilna os-Kenset, so she wouldn't lie to herself. The suggestion had been far too welcome;
that
was why she'd reacted as she did.

"Sit still and I'll plait your braids," Ilna said, taking a hank of the girl's long, fine hair and running it through her fingers. Touch would tell her how to interweave the strands and—

Ilna froze as she let herself understand what the pattern was telling her.

"Cashel, get up!" she said as she rose to her feet. Flinging back the tent flap she called, "Garric! Prince Garric!"

The pair of Blood Eagles posted at the entrance looked at her in surprise. "Come!" Ilna called, trotting in the direction of the large, silk-walled tent where she'd left Garric asleep.

Merota was at her heels. That was a good thing because Cashel struck the forepole—he wasn't used to tents—and broke it in half as he followed his sister. The tent collapsed behind him.

"Garric!" Ilna called again. The dome of light provided as much illumination as the full moon, but it distorted as much as it displayed. A cherry tree threw a shadow like a troll's across the side of the royal tent. The limbs seemed to squirm though the air was still.

The squad of Blood Eagles guarding Garric were rigid as statues. A lantern hanging from the extended ridgepole lighted the circle around them through its horn lenses, but the men themselves were in shadow. Their officer wore a silvered cuirass instead of the black enamel equipment of his troops.

"We have to see Prince Garric
now
," Ilna said as she stepped up to him. She expected a refusal—and the pattern her fingers were knotting would be her response. The danger Ilna had seen,
felt
as Merota's hair wove into plaits, brooked no delay.

The Blood Eagles didn't blink. They
were
statues, locked into a frozen sleep as they stood.

"Get a light!" Ilna said. The lantern was too high for her. Chalcus leaped and came down with it in his left hand, holding it by its hot iron base. Cashel pushed into the tent, bumping several of the guards aside with his shoulders. As the men toppled, they awakened with startled shouts.

Ilna followed her brother. Chalcus was beside her, holding the lantern now by its loop handle. He'd singed himself. The burned skin stank, but his rower's calluses were so thick that he probably hadn't felt the injury.

For an instant Ilna thought that Garric's body lay under a tent of cobweb in the corner. The web shifted, turned. It had the face of a spider.

"Colva!" Cashel shouted. He stepped forward, holding his quarterstaff in both hands like a battering ram.

The tendrils of webbing solidified. The face swelled into that of an attractive woman instead of a creature of nightmare. Ilna didn't recognize her.

"Cashel, my hero—" the woman said.

"Colva!" Cashel repeated. He struck her face with his staff. The hickory drove through as though she were smoke.

"Iron!" cried Tenoctris from behind them. "You have to use—"

Ilna's noose settled over the woman's neck and slipped through the liquid flesh instead of drawing tight. Cashel spun his staff end for end to bring the remaining ferrule forward. The staff caught on the tent roof. Silk tore, but it clogged his motion.

Colva laughed. As Chalcus came toward her she stepped through the wall of the tent.

And staggered back inside. A small dagger with its hilt wrapped in gold wire protruded from her chest, just to the left of her breastbone. She screamed during the instant she had before the chanteyman beheaded her, but she was already dying.

The thing that called itself Colva began to shrink in on itself like a meringue congealing. The creature looked less and less human as successive layers of illusion failed.

The bottom of the tent wall humped. Liane squirmed through, her face pale. She still held the gilded sheath of her little dagger in her left hand.

"Is he...?" she whispered to Ilna.

Tenoctris knelt beside Garric. As Sharina supported her, the old wizard touched her fingertips to Garric's throat. She closed her eyes, then opened them and faced the others again.

"We're too late," Tenoctris said. "I'm so sorry. Garric is dead."

There was complete silence. Then, for the first time in her life, Ilna cried openly.