The Rite (32 page)

“I’m not sure it meets with mine,” Celedon said. “You’ve more than once observed that retreating in good order while under attack is one of the most difficult tasks any force can undertake. If the goblins’ harassment renders you incapable of standing and fighting a second time when you reach the right patch of ground, your strategy fails.”

“It’s a chancy plan in a number of ways,” Dragonsbane admitted, “but also the best I can devise. If anyone has a better one, by all means, let’s hear it.”

The company stood silent for a moment.

Celedon grinned and said, “I guess that’s it, then. We’ll just have to hope for the favor of Lady Luck.”

Brimstone arched his serpentine neck, bending his crimson-eyed mask closer to the king.

“I can’t improve on your scheme,” the smoke drake whispered, “but I can suggest an embellishment.”

Dragonsbane surely loathed vampires as profoundly as the other paladins and priests in the assembly, but unlike them, he didn’t allow even a hint of that revulsion to show in his expression.

“Please,” he said, “tell us.”

Weary as she was, Kara no longer trusted herself to handle the ancient documents with the delicacy required. Fortunately, the mindless, shapeless, invisible helper she’d conjured was immune to fatigue. She willed it to turn the page, and the brown, brittle leaf slowly shifted without crumbling.

Eyes aching, squinting at the crabbed, faded characters that kept trying to blur, she read to the end of a nonsensical tale in stumbling iambic heptameter. At the conclusion, the butterfly knight flew into a misty held of marigolds and emerged transformed into a kestrel.

By all the notes ever sung, what was it supposed to signify? Had the knight, by changing from insect to bird, become a higher form of life? Or, by becoming a predator, had he lost his innocence? And in any case, what agency produced the metamorphosis?

It was hopeless. Kara didn’t understand and she never would. She felt another urge to smash the mocking, worthless books to dust, and this time, Dorn wasn’t there to stop her.

But the thought of him was.

He believed she could solve the puzzle, and even with the Rage gnawing at her mind, she couldn’t betray his faith in her. She drew a ragged breath, calming herself, and returned to her labors.

Hours passed, somehow seeming both to drag on interminably and to hurtle by. Her phantom servant ceased to be, and she invoked another. A neophyte brought her a tray of bread and beans. She tried to eat, but a single taste made her stomach churn, and she set the rest out of the way on the floor.

And through it all, she accomplished nothing, until at last, she pushed back from the table and closed her eyes. She needed a different approach, but what could that possibly be? Reading was reading, wasn’t it?

Well, perhaps not. She was studying the allegories as a human scholar might, pondering every image, symbol, and apparently meaningless incident as she read. But she wasn’t a human scholar. She was a song dragon, and both story and magic were a part of her very essence, forces she supposedly comprehended instinctively.

She resolved to try experiencing the ancient writings as she’d experience any poem or tale. She’d stop agonizing over every nuance and see how the material made her feel.

Much of it didn’t make her feel anything. The stories were simply too disjointed and obscure. But as she once again worked her way through the feckless wanderings of the butterfly knight, something occurred to her.

The marigolds represented fire. Their yellow was the brightness of flame, and the fog swirling around them was actually smoke.

Fire could purify. By turning an aimlessly flitting butterfly into a sharp-eyed hawk, flying purposively forth in search of prey, had it cured the character of folly? Perhaps even of madness? Was that what the poet was implying?

If he was, then other elements of the tale, and even the surrounding material, must relate to the idea of fire, physical or metaphysical, actual or notional, in a way that made sense according to the principles of magic. She read on, and though much of the texts remained entirely cryptic, nonetheless, fragmentary patterns began to emerge. Until, her heart pounding with excitement, she started to see how one might construct a spell. She dipped a quill in the inkwell and scribbled furiously on the fresh parchments the monks had provided for her use.

At last she completed a deceptively brief and simple-looking incantation. She regarded the lines with a fierce satisfaction that immediately withered into doubt.

Because she didn’t actually know that she’d truly fathomed any part of the arcane writings. Perhaps her interpretation was completely false, the product of frenzy, exhaustion, and wishful thinking. Even if she had gotten part or all of it right, the majority of the information in the grimoires, all the fine and subtle points, remained impenetrable. Bow, then, could she possibly imagine that she’d successfully moved from a set of half-comprehended mystical relationships to the exquisitely balanced and nuanced artifact that was a functional spell?

She scowled at her misgivings. The magic would work because it had to. Because she had no time to study and tinker endlessly to refine it.

In any case, she didn’t need to sit and wonder if she’d succeeded. It was an easy thing to test.

She rose and sang the words she’d written. As she reached the final notes, she couldn’t help but tense. The spell was meant to draw a sort of cauterizing blaze into her mind, no less dangerous for being psychic and spiritual instead of corporeal. If she’d botched her work, the flame might sear what remained of her sanity and even her very soul away. Even if she’d gotten it right, she feared the magic’s touch would be excruciating.

It wasn’t, though. All she felt was a fleeting lightness, as if the spell had lifted a weight from her being.

Will and Pavel rounded a corner, and the priest stared in surprise at the old clapboard building across the street. He’d expected to find it ablaze with light and raucous with music and laughter. But except for the gleam of a candle behind a window or two, it was dark, and entirely quiet. The painted sign above the door was gone, and by the looks of it, someone had remodeled the stable to serve some other function.

“Oh, slop and dung,” said Will. “I know you’re hopeless in the wild, but I didn’t think even you could get lost in the same town where you grew up.”

“This was it,” Pavel insisted, and he was sure of it. In days gone by, the building had been the Boot and Whistle, the tavern where he’d learned to drink, play cards, and chase women, as much a part of his youth as the cloisters and archives of the Temple of the Dawn. But it appeared someone had turned the place into a cheap boarding house. Pavel had scarcely thought of the establishment during the years he’d been away, but nonetheless felt a pang of sadness to find it gone.

“Oh, well,” said Will, “it’s a pleasant enough night, and it shouldn’t be that difficult to find a mug of beer. Let’s walk on.”

The council of war had dragged on for some time after everyone ran out of worthwhile things to say. At the end of it all, Will and Pavel had discovered a common urge to escape the company of lords and royalty for a little while. Accordingly, they’d slipped away from Dragonsbane’s citadel to visit the commoner precincts of Heliogabalus.

Pavel found he quite enjoyed the stroll. He liked hearing the accents and idioms of Damaran speech, observing the intricately carved gingerbread under the eaves of the Damaran houses, and catching the hearty aromas of Damaran cooking. They didn’t make him regret the wanderer’s life he’d chosen. That fed a part of his soul he could nourish in no other way. But even so, he realized a part of him had missed them.

“We helped Brimstone rescue the king,” he said after a while. “We could head back to Thentia now, and perhaps we should.”

“But you don’t want to,” said Will.

“No. Damara’s my homeland and the outcome here is still in doubt. You could say it’s up to Dragonsbane and his knights now, we have little more to contribute….”

“Speak for yourself,” said Will. “The king’s going to need scouts and skirmishers, folk with our—say rather, my— talents to make his plan work.”

“So you don’t mind lingering?”

“Not if they’ll pay me what I’m worth.”

“That could be a problem,” Pavel said with a smile. “I don’t think Damara mints coins in such small denominations.”

5-8 Flamerule, the Year of Rogue Dragons

Slathered in blood, dripping it on the stone floor, Malazan lunged at Dorn. He sidestepped, cut at the dragon’s mask, and his hand-and-half sword glanced off her scales. The gigantic red lashed her head to the side to catch him in her fangs, and he leaped backward. His foot landed and skidded in wet gore, throwing him off balance. The wyrm snatched for him with her talons—

And he woke flailing. Kara was leaning over his cot, touching his shoulder gently, and had to jerk away to dodge a sweep of his iron hand.

“Easy!” she said, her moon-blond hair shining in the gloom.

“I’m all right now,” he said, though that wasn’t entirely true.

Awake, he suffered the smoldering sting of his burns and blisters, wounds sustained when he didn’t quite manage to dodge a flare of Malazan’s fiery breath. The monastery had exhausted its supply of medicinal elixirs, and even with so many of its defenders slain, didn’t have enough priests to restore all those who remained to full health. Some men simply had to endure their wounds.

“I take it you were having a nightmare,” Kara said.

“Yes. I fight the battles when I’m awake, then have to do it all over again in my sleep.” Anxiety jolted him. “Battle. Malar’s claw, are the wyrms attacking?”

He scrambled up off the cot.

“No,” Kara said, taking hold of his forearm, restraining him. “Do you hear, everything’s quiet?”

He felt chagrined at his surge of panic. “Right. Sorry. I guess I’m too tired to think straight.”

“Everyone is,” she said, smiling. “But I’ve discovered something nonetheless. Do you sense anything different about me?”

He studied her. Something had changed, though he couldn’t quite tell what. The closest he could come was: “You seem

more like you were when I first knew you, in Ylraphon, and sailing down the Dragon Reach.”

“I am,” she said, “because I’ve virtually quelled the frenzy inside me. I recovered the enchantment Sammaster must use to keep the chromatics sane enough to serve his purposes. I tried it on myself, and it worked. Thanks be to Mystra that you held me to my task.”

“Then… this is it? We win?”

Some of the elation went out of her expression and she said, “Well, no. Remember, the Rage is waxing steadily stronger. In time, the defense will fail.”

“Still,” he said, feeling guilty to have dimmed her moment of triumph, “it buys us more time to solve the greater puzzle. Now we need to clear out of here, and give a dose of the remedy to your fellow rogues.” He sighed. “It will be hard to walk away from our comrades, but Cantoule swears the monks won’t abandon the monastery, no matter what.”

“We can’t, either. What I’ve gleaned thus far is only a fraction of the secrets concealed in the ancient books. We were right that we absolutely must save them, and the only way to do that is to break the siege.”

Dorn scowled, pondering the problem.

“That will take reinforcements powerful enough to make a difference against a horde of dragons,” he said, “and mobile enough to get here in time. With the rogues scattered across the North, that leaves the wizards in Thentia, though I hate the thought of it. They can’t unravel the answers we need if they’re fighting battles, certainly not if they die in them, and they might. They’re powerful, but for the most part, not veteran war mages. I don’t know how many of them could handle themselves in a conflict such as this.”

“I agree,” Kara said. “But we have an alternative. Lareth and other dragons who accept his authority are hiding somewhere in the Galenas, hoping their magical slumber will save them from the Rage. We thought of approaching him after our expedition into Northkeep, but decided we still hadn’t learned enough to persuade him that our scheme was superior to his.”

“But a charm to tame frenzy, even if only temporarily, ought to convince him, and he and the other metal drakes can fly south to save the monastery.” Dorn frowned and added, “That’s assuming we can find the refuge.”

“I hope we can. It’s probably not far from the bowl where Lareth convened his parliament of dragons.”

“Then that’s our plan. We’ll tell Cantoule, then you, Raryn, and I will leave through the caverns at once.”

“I understand that our task could scarcely be more urgent. Still, now that I’ve cleansed myself of the Rage, do you think we could steal just a few minutes for ourselves?” She lowered her eyes. “It wouldn’t be the long, sweet night I hoped for, but perhaps we’ll find some joy in it even so.”

Dorn felt a giddy surge of excitement. “I’m sure we will.”

Dorn and Kara found Raryn standing guard behind a breastwork constructed of broken stone. The burly dwarf took one look at them, and grinned.

“It’s about time,” he said.

Dorn felt his face grow hot, and dealt with the embarrassment by pressing on with the business at hand.

“The three of us are leaving,” he snapped.

“Why?” Raryn asked. Speaking in tandem, Dorn and Kara explained. But when they finished, the scout said, “That’s good news. But I think I’ll bide here for the time being. Chatulio blazed the trail through the caves, so you don’t need me to find the way out again, nor to talk to this King of Justice, either, I expect. But these lads”—he waved a broad, stubby-fingered hand at the haggard, dirty-faced monks standing guard alongside him—”might still need a dragon hunter to advise them. They’ve learned a lot, but maybe not all our tricks.”

“You realize,” said Dorn, “the monks can’t hold out much longer. Kara and I may not make it back in time. Or at all.”

Raryn shrugged. “Folk can only do their best, and let luck decide the rest. So the brothers and I will make our stand here, you’ll watch Kara’s back on her journey, and we’ll meet again when we can, in this life or the next.”