The Dragon Society (Obsidian Chronicles Book 2) (52 page)

Three days later, Arlian received word that Rime would submit to the experiment.

And two days after that Rime arrived at the Old Palace, where Oeshir had prepared a bedchamber, fitting it with an assortment of talismans, enclosing the bed itself within a circle of iron and silver chains to shut out any hostile magic.

"Probably not needed here," Isein said apologetically as she moved the chains aside so that Rime could reach the bed without entangling her wooden leg, "but she needs these back home, and they make her feel safe."

"Hmph," Rime said, as she settled onto the bedding.

Oeshir herself was not there yet, but Arlian was—he and Isein were the only others in the room with Rime.

Black was in an adjoining sitting room with Lily, Kitten, and Brook, who had volunteered to provide the clean blood the magic required.

Arlian, of course, could not donate, since his blood was tainted; Hasty had hesitantly suggested she might, but had been refused—as a nursing mother, she needed her strength. Cricket had shuddered at the idea and refused, while Musk had backed out at the sight of the crystal blade Oeshir intended to wield.

"You must remove your clothing, my lady," Isein said apologetically.

TH leave" Arlian said, as Rime glared at the Aritheaan.

"You might have mentioned this sooner," Rime said, standing up again and reaching for the buttons of her gown. "Ari, I want you here to keep an eye on these two. I'll trust you to keep your eyes off me."

"As you please," Arlian said, stepping back from the door.

"Now, Isein," Rime said, as she undid the buttons,

"why
must I remove my clothing?"

"So that no blood will stain the garments, my lady,"

Isein said. "And so Oeshir can cut your flesh without harming them"

"Cut my flesh? Then this spell won't just involve an incantation or potion?"

Isein glanced uneasily at Arlian. "Perhaps we should have explained."

"I think you should explain now," Arlian said. "Before we go any farther. I knew that the spell required drawing clean blood and using it to replace the tainted blood, but is there more than that?"

"I am ... that..." Isein struggled for a moment with the unfamiliar language, then said simply, "Yes."

"Please do explain, then," Rime said.

Isein looked at Arlian, then back at Rime.

"Long ago," she said, "there were many wizards who roamed the lands around Arithei."

There are still many wizards around Arithei," Arlian pointed out.

"There were more once. Not so settled. They fought each other, and of course they fought the creatures in the Dreaming Mountains and elsewhere."

"Yes?"

"Yes. h was very dangerous. Many were killed, and some of them made a trick so they would not be so easy to kill. They took their hearts from their chests and stored them away safely at home when they traveled. It was very difficult to kill a wizard with no heart.

You could still burn him, or cut off his head, but he could not die of bleeding, or of a stab in the chest, and poison could not reach his heart to stop it."

"Wait a minute ..." Rime began.

"But the wizard could not live for long without his heart," Isein said quickly, before Rime could complete her sentence. "The heart would be restored to the chest in no more than three days, or the wizard would die. If a wizard was poisoned, then, he must remove the poison before he restored his heart.
That
was how this magic became known, and the magicians of Arithei stole the knowledge from the old wizards."

"You're going to
cut out my heart!"
Rime demanded.

"Oeshir is," Isein agreed.

Rime looked past her at Arlian. "I said you could cut my throat, but this is a little more than that..."

"You will live!" Isein insisted.

"Damn you, woman, stop interrupting me!" Rime snatched up her legbone and slapped at Isein's hand with it. "Let me think about this."

"She will take out your heart," Isein said, "and wash it in water and fill it with clean blood to purify it, and use a charm to draw all the poison into the hole in your chest, where it can be removed. Then she will put the heart back, and heal the wound."

"And I'll live through this."

"Yes!" She hesitated, then admitted, "In Arithei, the people live through it. Here, no one has ever tried."

"Oh, how
very
reassuring," Rime said. "And tell me, will it
hurt
to have my chest cut open?"

Isein looked unhappy.

"Yes," she said. "Very much."

"And do you have any magic that will help with that"

"Herbs," Isein said, pointing at a collection of glass-ware on a bedside table. "They will make you unable to move, and deaden the pain."

"Deaden it"

"Some. It will hurt"

"Rime," Arlian said, "I didn't know all this. If you want to curse my name, dress yourself, and go home, I will not take it amiss."

"The old wizards cut out their
own
hearts," Isein said. "They could not use the herbs because they needed to stay alert, but they could still work the magic, despite the pain. It cannot be
that
bad."

"I'm not a wizard," Rime said.

"But you're a sorceress," Arlian pointed out.

"And a dragonheart," Rime said. "Damn you, Arlian. Very well." She reached for her buttons again, and Arlian looked away.

When she was naked, even her wooden leg removed, Isein handed her a cup of herbal brew; Rime drank it slowly, but without hesitation.

"What does it taste like?" Arlian asked.

"Pleasant, actually," Rime said. "Somewhat like ..."

She blinked, as if puzzled. "Like mint." Her voice was slightly slurred.

"Lie down," Isein told her.

Rime obeyed. Isein carefully took the ancient bone from her numbing fingers and laid it on a table, then looked up.

That was when Oeshir finally arrived.

She wore the strange, bright robes of an Aritheian, and bore a blue glass bowl, roughly the size of a man's head, held out before her as she marched ceremoni-ously into the room. She set the bowl on the foot of the bed
,
placing it beside Rime's remaining foot.

Rime lay unnaturally still; the herbs were clearly taking effect.

Arlian didn't see where Oeshir had carried the crystal knife, but suddenly it was in her hand. Arlian's hand slipped under his coat to the waistband of his breeches, where his own hidden knife waited—one with a blade of gleaming black stone, just in case something about this magic went wrong.

Oeshir had not spoken a word since entering the room; now she began a chant, gesturing with her crystal knife. The blade seemed to glow white, but Arlian was unsure whether that was his imagination, or the crystal catching the sunlight, or the magic at work.

She laid the knife on Rime's chest, and despite the paralytic herbs Rime twitched at its touch, her hands and foot jerking slightly. Then Oeshir brought forth two talismans—again, Arlian could not see whence she drew them; they seemed to simply appear in her hands. One was red and vaguely heart-shaped, while the other was a tiny white stone carving of a woman.

Oeshir did something with her hands, and it appeared to Arlian that the heart talisman somehow passed
through
the white stone, emerging from the other side.

And now the red talisman was pulsing gently.

Oeshir placed it on Rime's throat, then picked up the crystal knife again.

Then she plunged the gleaming blade into Rime's chest.

Rime convulsed, arms and legs flopping uncontrollably; her eyes and mouth flew wide with shock, but no sound emerged. Blood spurted, soaking the magician's knife and hands—but only once.

Arlian's vision blurred at the sight; he blinked and swallowed, feeling ill.

Oeshir paid no attention to the blood or Rime's movements, but continued to chant. With one hand she sawed the knife through Rime's body, through flesh and bone both; with the other she held the red talisman on Rime's throat, holding the thrashing woman in place.

Arlian swallowed again, struggling not to intervene.

Isein watched calmly from the side of the bed opposite Oeshir.

Then Oeshir pulled the blade out, and Rime's movements subsided. The magician laid the bloody knife on Rime's abdomen and reached one hand into the gaping chest wound, while the other picked up the red talisman.

Rime should be dead, Arlian knew—such a wound would have been almost instantly fatal. She was
not
dead, though—her eyes were wide and staring but alive, her fingers clenched and unclenched despite the herbs.

The air around the bed seemed to ripple, and the colors of the bedclothes shimmered unnaturally; Arlian remembered the waves of wild magic that he had seen flashing through the sky in the lands south of the Borderlands. He had never expected to see anything like that here, in his own home in Manfort. He thought he could see Rime's severed ribs flexing like snakes to make room for the magician's hand, but he was unsure whether that was illusion or reality.

Oeshir tensed, and pulled, and her hand emerged from Rime's chest clutching something red and bloody. Her other hand instantly dropped into the wound, inserting the red talisman in place of Rime's excised heart.

Then she took the bloody, still-beating heart in both hands, leaving the talisman in the wound, and placed it reverently in the waiting glass bowl.

The chant ended. "Water," Oeshir called.

Isein stepped forward, pitcher ready—Arlian had not seen her pick it up. She poured clean water into the bowl while Oeshir turned her attention back to Rime's chest. The white stone talisman was in her hand again; she held it to her lips and kissed it, then rested it across the gash in Rime's chest.

Rime's eyes were beginning to focus again, Arlian thought. Her fingers were still moving erratically, and her whole body had begun to tremble.

Oeshir said something in Aritheian. "The stone is drawing the poison," Isein translated.

"Will it take long?" Arlian asked.

"She doesn't know," Isein replied. "My lord, we will need blood soon, to keep the heart alive."

"Of course." Arlian hurried to the door and called,

"Black!"

He was relieved, in truth, to have an excuse to look away. The knowledge that he had inflicted this horrible, unnatural, excruciating thing on his friend was churning his stomach, making him physically ill.

Black came to the door between rooms, and Arlian was suddenly appalled at the thought of letting his steward see Rime lying there, naked and mutilated.

"In here," Arlian said, pressing Black gently away from the bedchamber. "For modesty's sake."

Black nodded. "What do you need me to do?" he asked.

Arlian glanced back at the bed, where Isein had plunged her hands into the bowl, and was washing Rime's heart as if it were a cabbage. "We'll need blood soon," he said. "I don't know how much."

"Half the bowl," Isein called.

Arlian closed his eyes, sickened by the thought of drawing that much blood from his guests. Then he opened them again.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I should never have done this."

"Yes, you should," Brook said. "It won't kill us."

"I'll do it." Black said. "Isein gave us a bowl."

"My lord!" Isein called, her voice suddenly desperate. Arlian turned to find both the magicians staring in motionless horror at Rime's chest.

The white talisman had turned dark red. It had wrapped itself in a curtain of blood that now formed translucent wings and birdlike talons. Its shape had already changed, and it shifted further as Arlian watched—from the form of a woman to that of something else.

The new form was crooked and misshapen, its head too large for its body, its legs like twigs, but it was unmistakably a miniature red dragon. In that shape it was crawling across Rime's body, down across her shoulder onto the blood-soaked bedclothes.

Arlian snatched the obsidian dagger from his waistband and leapt to the bedside. There he hesitated, as the dragon-thing turned to face him.

"Will it hurt her if I kill it?" he asked.

Isein looked at him, then at Oeshir; she was clearly in no shape to translate that, and Arlian decided that it really didn't matter. If killing the thing killed Rime, at least it would end her pain.

He stabbed it, driving the knife down between the thing's shoulder blades, between its wings, pinning it to the bed. It squealed, a thin, high-pitched sound like the cry of a wounded rat, and the bloody shape dissolved, leaving the stone woman—or rather, the shattered fragments of the stone woman; the obsidian knife had broken the talisman into a dozen pieces.

The tip of the knife had broken, as well, and a tri-angular splinter of black glass stood in the tangled bedclothes.

And the white stone had turned black. The bedclothes beneath those fragments smoked, and Arlian smelled something he did not recognize immediately, but then placed.

Dragon venom.

Oeshir babbled wildly in Aritheian, but Arlian interrupted her, pointing his knife at the bowl. "Now what?" he asked.

Oeshir caught herself. She fell silent, took a long, deep breath, then let it out. She turned to the bowl and slid her thumbs under the rim.

Then, to Arlian's surprise, she lifted out a clear inner bowl; what he had taken for a single blue glass bowl was two bowls, one nested tightly inside the other. Now Oeshir had separated them. She placed the removed, water-filled inner bowl beside the empty outer one, then lifted Rime's heart from the murky, bloody water and placed it in the empty blue bowl.

It was still beating strongly. Arlian's breath came a little more easily when he saw that; Rime was not dead.

"Blood," Oeshir said.

Arlian nodded, and hurried back to the sitting room door.

"We need the blood now," he told Black.

Black was kneeling before Lily, holding her arm over a silver bowl; blood was running down her wrist into the bowl. Brook was sitting in a nearby chair, looking very pale and holding her own bandaged forearm. Kitten was sitting on the floor with her face to the wall, determinedly not watching any of the gory oc-currences around her.