The Dragons of Babel (6 page)

“They are still building up their numbers and their courage. Yet their leader, the No-name one, is shrewd and capable. It worries me that he has made himself invisible to your eye, and thus to mine. Walking about the village, you have oft enough come upon a nest in the fields where he slept, or scented the distinctive tang of his scat. Yet when was the last time you saw him in person?”

“I haven't even seen these nests nor smelled the dung you speak of.”

“You've seen and smelled, but not been aware of it. Meanwhile, No-name skillfully eludes your sight. He has made himself a ghost.”

“The more ghostly the better. I don't care if I never see him again.”

“You will see him again. Remember, when you do, that I warned you so.”

The dragon's prophecy came true not a week later. Will was walking his errands and admiring, as he so often did these days, how ugly the village had become in his eyes. Half the houses were wattle and daub—little more than sticks and dried mud. Those that had honest planks were left unpainted and gray, to keep down the yearly assessment when the teindinspector came through from the central government. Pigs wandered the streets, and the occasional scavenger bear as well, pelt moth-eaten and shabby. Nothing was clean, nothing was new, nothing was ever mended.

Such were the thoughts Will was thinking when somebody thrust a gunnysack over his head, while somebody else punched him in the stomach, and a third person swept his feet out from under him.

It was like a conjuring trick. One moment he was walking down a noisy street, with children playing in the dust and artisans striding by to their workshops and goodwives leaning from windows to gossip or sitting in doorways shucking peas, and the next he was being carried swiftly away, in darkness, by eight strong hands.

He fought against the bag from within, but could not break free. His cries, muffled by the sack, were ignored. If anybody heard him—and there had been many about on the street a moment before—nobody came to his aid.

After what seemed an enormously long time, he was dumped on the ground. Angrily, he struggled out of the
gunnysack. He was lying on the stony and slightly damp floor of the old gravel pit, south of the village. One crumbling wall was overgrown with flowering vines. He could hear birdsong. Standing, he flung the gunnysack to the ground and confronted his kidnappers.

There were twelve of them and they all wore green shirts.

He knew them all, of course, just as he knew everyone else in the village. But, more, they had all been his friends at one time or another. Were he free of the dragon's bondage, doubtless he would be one of their number. Now, though, he was filled with naught but scorn for them, for he knew exactly how the dragon would deal with them, were they to harm his lieutenant. He would accept them into his body, one at a time, to corrupt their minds and fill their bodies with cancers. He would tell the first in excruciating detail exactly how he was going to die, stage by stage, and he would make sure the eleven others watched as it happened. Death after death, the survivors would watch and anticipate. Last of all would be their leader, No-name.

Will understood how the dragon thought.

“Turn away,” he said. “This will do your cause no good whatsoever.”

Two of the greenshirties took him by the arms. They thrust him before No-name. His former friend leaned on a crutch of ash wood, tense with hatred, eyes bugged.

“It is good of you to be so concerned for our
cause
. But you do not understand our
cause
, do you? Our
cause
is simply this.” No-name slashed something hard across Will's face, cutting a long scratch across his forehead and down one cheek.

“Llandrysos
, I command you to die!” No-name cried. The greenshirties holding Will's arms released them. He staggered back a step. A trickle of something warm went tickling down his face. He touched his hand to it. Blood.

No-name stared at him. In his outstretched hand was an
elf-shot, one of those small stone arrowheads found everywhere in the fields after a hard rain. Will did not know if they had been made by ancient civilizations or grew from pebbles by spontaneous generation. Nor had he known, before now, that to scratch somebody with one while crying out his true name would cause that person to die. But the stench of ozone that accompanied death-magic hung in the air, lifting the small hairs on the back of his neck and tickling his nose with its eldritch force, and the knowledge of what had almost happened was inescapable.

The look of absolute astonishment on No-name's face curdled and became rage. He dashed the elf-shot to the ground. “You were never my friend!” he cried in a fury. “The night when we exchanged true names and mingled blood, you lied! You lied! You were as false then as you are now!”

It was true. Will remembered that long-ago time when he and Puck had rowed their coracles to a distant river-island, and there caught fish which they grilled over coals and a turtle from which they made a soup prepared in its own shell. It had been Puck's idea to swear eternal friendship and Will, desperate for a name-friend and knowing Puck would not believe he had none, had invented a true name for himself. He was careful to let his friend reveal first, and so knew to shiver and roll up his eyes when he spoke the name. But he had experienced a terrible guilt then for his deceit, and every time since when he thought of that night.

Even now.

Standing on his one good leg, No-name tossed his crutch upward and seized it near the tip. Then he swung it around and smashed Will in the face.

Will fell.

The greenshirties were all over him then, kicking and hitting him.

Briefly, it came to Will that, if he were included among
their number, there were thirteen present and engaged upon a single action. They were a coven, and he the random sacrifice who is worshiped with kicks and blows. Then there was nothing but his suffering and the rage that rose up within him, so strong that though it could not weaken the pain, yet it drowned out the fear he should have felt on realizing that he was going to die. He knew only pain and a kind of wonder: a vast, world-encompassing astonishment that so profound a thing as death could happen to him, accompanied by a lesser wonder that No-name and his merry thugs had the toughness to take his punishment all the way to death's portal, and that vital step beyond. They were only boys, after all. Where had they learned such discipline?

“I think he's dead,” said a voice. Perhaps it was No-name's. Perhaps not. It came to him as if from an enormous distance.

“Let's see.” One last booted foot connected with already broken ribs. He gasped and spasmed. Somebody made a scoffing noise. “That is our message to your master dragon,” he said. “If you live, take it to him.”

Then silence. Eventually, Will forced himself to open one eye—the other was swollen shut—and saw that he was alone again. It was a gorgeous day, sunny without being at all hot. Birds sang all about him. A sweet breeze ruffled his hair.

He picked himself up, bleeding and weeping with rage, and stumbled back to the dragon.

Because the dragon would not trust any of the healing-women inside him, Will's injuries were treated by a fluffer. She knelt alongside the leather couch to suck the injuries from Will's body and accept them as her own. It was only as strength returned that he was able to comprehend how young the girl was—younger even than himself. Yet when he feebly tried to push her away, the dragon overruled him. The last drops of pain drained from him, and the child stood.

It would have shamed and sickened a cockatrice to see how painfully the girl hobbled outside again.

“Tell me who did this,” the dragon whispered afterward, “and we shall have revenge.”

“No.”

There was a long hiss, as a steam valve somewhere deep in the thorax vented pressure. “You toy with me.”

Will turned his face to the wall. “It's my problem and not yours.”

“You
are
my problem.”

Within the cockpit there was a constant low-grade mumble and grumble of machinery that faded to nothing when one stopped paying attention to it. Some part of this was the ventilation system, for the air never quite went stale, though
it often had a flat under-taste. The rest was surely reflexive—meant solely to keep the dragon alive. Listening to those mechanical voices, fading deeper and deeper within the tyrant's corpus, Will had a vision of an interior that never came to an end but was a world in itself, all the night contained within that lightless iron body, expanding inward in an inversion of the natural order, stars twinkling in the vasty reaches of distant condensers and fuel pumps and somewhere a crescent moon, perhaps, caught in the gear train. “I won't argue,” Will said. “Nor will I ever tell you the merest word of what you desire to learn.”

“You will.”

“Wait until the Armies of Twilight rise from the sea to overwhelm the land, and still you will be disappointed.”

“Think'st so? I tell you, this very hour I will have my will of you.”

“No!”

The dragon fell silent. The leather of the pilot's couch gleamed weakly in the soft light. Will's wrists ached.

T
he outcome was never in doubt. Try though he might, Will could not resist the call of the leather couch, of the grips that filled his hand, of the needles that slid into his wrists. The dragon entered him, and had from him all the information he desired, and this time he did not leave.

Will walked barefoot through the village streets, leaving footprints of flame behind him. He was filled with wrath and the dragon.
“Come out!”
he roared. “Bring out your greenshirties, every one of them, or I shall come after them, street by street, house by house, room by room.” He put a hand on the nearest door and wrenched it from its hinges. Broken fragments of boards fell flaming to the ground. Vague shapes fled inward. “Spillikin cowers here-within. Don't make me come in after him!”

Shadowy hands flung Spillikin face-first into the dirt at Will's feet.

Spillikin was a harmless albino stick figure of a marsh-walker who screamed when Will closed a cauterizing hand about his arm to haul him to his feet.

“Follow me,” Will/the dragon said.

So great was Will's twin-spirited fury that none could stand up to him. He burned hot as a bronze idol, and the heat went before him in a great wave, withering plants, charring house fronts, and setting hair ablaze when somebody did not flee from him quickly enough.
“I am wrath!”
he screamed.
“I am blood vengeance! I am justice!
Feed me or suffer!”

The greenshirties were, of course, brought out.

No-name was, of course, not among their number.

The greenshirties were lined up before the dragon in Tyrant Square. They knelt in the dirt before him, heads down. Only two were so unwary as to be caught in their green shirts. The others were bare-chested or in mufti. All were terrified, and one had pissed himself. Their families and neighbors had followed after them and now filled the square with their wails of lament. Will quelled them with a look.

“Your king knows your true names,” he said sternly to the greenshirties, “and can kill you with a word.”

“It is true,” said Hag Applemere. Her face was stiff and impassive, though one of the greenshirties was her own brother.

“More, he can make you suffer such dementia as would make you believe yourselves in Hell, and suffering its torments forever.”

“It is true,” the hag said.

“Yet he disdains to bend the full weight of his anger upon you. You are no threat to him. He esteems you as creatures of little or no import.”

“It is true.”

“One only does he desire vengeance upon. Your leader—he who calls himself No-name. This being so, your most merciful lord has made this offer: Stand.” They obeyed, and
he seized a rake that had been left leaning against one of the houses fronting the square. His grip set the wooden shaft ablaze. He tossed the rake lightly upward and caught it deftly by the tines. “Bring No-name to me while this fire yet burns, and you shall all go free.” He held the brand high. “Fail, and you will suffer such torments as the ingenuity of a dragon can devise.”

“It is true.”

Somebody—not one of the greenshirties—was sobbing softly and steadily. Will ignored it. There was more Dragon within him than Self. It was a strange feeling, not being in control. He liked it. It was like being a small coracle carried helplessly along by a raging current. The river of emotion had its own logic; it knew where it was going. “Go!” he cried. “Now!”

The greenshirties scattered like pigeons.

Not half an hour later, No-name was brought, bruised and struggling, into the square. His former disciples had tied his hands behind his back and gagged him with a red bandanna. He had been beaten—not so badly as Will had been, but well and thoroughly. Blood ran down from his nose.