Worldbinder (7 page)

Once my rank is secure, Alun thought, I could ask her father for her hand in marriage. He won’t go for it. But if he said no, what would I have lost?

He strongly doubted that the Emir would say yes. There were rumors that he was saving his daughter, that he hoped to marry her to High King Urstone’s son.

Alun thought, But that will never hap—

A huge shadow fell over him, followed by the pounding of heavy wings. Alun’s heart leapt in his chest. He suddenly felt as a mouse must feel when touched by the shadow of the hawk.

He peered up in terror and saw some beast. It wasn’t a drake. This thing had vast translucent wings of palest gold that rippled in the air like sheets moved by the wind.

A wyrmling Seccath! Alun thought, fear rising in his throat. Alun had seen a Seccath only once, nine years ago, when he was but a boy. The High King himself had captured it and brought it to Castle Luciare, where it was stripped of its wings and held prisoner deep in the dungeons, even to this day.

The Seccath winged its way straight toward Daylan Hammer, and Alun had the forethought to realize that the immortal had no weapon to protect him.

Just as Alun was about to shout a warning, the Seccath folded its wings and dropped to the tower wall, opposite from Daylan Hammer.

“Well met,” Daylan Hammer said.

The wyrmling settled onto the wall. She was a pale-eyed woman with blond hair shaved short and with huge bones. Her neck and forehead were tattooed with cruel glyphs, prayers to Lady Despair. There was no beauty in her that Daylan could see, unless one thought that brutality could be considered comely.

Not for the first time, Daylan considered how decency and innocence were inextricably mingled with a human’s concept of beauty. On almost every world he had visited, in any nation, a person whose face was smooth, childlike—innocent, and compassionate—was considered more beautiful than one who was not. Not so among the wyrmlings.

Indeed, it was believed that the wyrmlings’ ancestors had been human, but they had been bred for war over so many generations that they had evolved into something else. So there was an inbred cruelty and wariness to the woman—a rough and hawkish face, a scowl to the mouth, blazing eyes, and a wary stance, as if she only hoped for a chance to gut him.

Her artificial wings folded around her now, making her look as if she were draped in translucent yellow robes. Behind her, the dying sun hung just above the horizon like a bloody eye.

The wyrmling peered at Daylan, cold and mocking in her rage. The wyrmlings could not abide light. It pained their eyes and burned their skin.

Humans feared the darkness, and so they had agreed to meet here now, in the half-light.

The sight of her sent a shudder through Daylan. Thoughts of compassion, honor, decency—all were alien to her, incomprehensible. The maggot that infected her soul saw to that.

“Well met?” she asked, as if trying to make sense of the greeting. “Why would it be well to meet me? Your body trembles. It knows the gaze of a predator when it sees it. Yet you think it well to meet me?”

Daylan chuckled. “It is only a common greeting among my people.”

“Is it?” the wyrmling demanded, as if he lied.

“So,” Daylan said, “you asked for proof that your princess is still alive.”

“Can you name the day she drew her first blood?”

It was a difficult question, Daylan knew. The wyrmlings kept great beasts to use in times of war—the world wyrms. Among wyrmlings, time was measured in “rounds” which lasted for three years—the length of time that it took between breeding cycles for a female wyrm. Each day in a round had its own name. Thus, there were over a thousand days in a round, and if Daylan had to lie, he would have had a slim chance of guessing the right day.

“Princess Kan-hazur says that she drew first blood upon the day of Bitter Moon.” That was all that he needed to say, but he wanted to offer ample proof. “It was in the two hundred and third year of the reign of the Dread Emperor Zul-torac. She fought in the Vale of Pearls against the he-beast Nezyallah, and broke his neck with her club.”

Daylan knew a bit about politics among wyrmlings. As he understood it, the “he-beast” was in fact the Princess’s own older brother. He would have been larger and stronger than her, but the princess claimed that her brother was also less violent, and therefore less “able to lead,” by wyrmling standards.

“Aaaaah,” the wyrmling sighed. “A fine battle it was. Kan-hazur won scars both of flesh and of the heart that day.”

“Yes,” Daylan said. “And now, do we have a bargain?”

    5    

Alun waited for the two to leave—the wyrmling flying back north, while Daylan Hammer climbed gingerly from the wall.

He let Daylan Hammer have a five minute lead, and then hurried for the castle.

I’m in a real fix now, Alun decided. It was eleven miles back to the castle, and he’d never be able to make it before dark. The wyrmling harvesters would come out
by then. Indeed, the last sliver of sun dipped below the horizon as he began his race, and he knew that he had perhaps a half an hour of light, and there would be only the faintest waning moon tonight.

Maybe I’ll get lucky, he thought. The lords have been hunting the harvesters hard. There can’t be many around the castle.

But he had little hope. Wyrmling harvesters butchered humans, taking certain glands that the wyrmlings used for elixirs. Thus, the castle attracted the wyrmlings like wolves to a carcass.

So Alun ran, heart pounding, sweat streaming down his forehead, his back, his neck and face. He came up out of the bogs into the wastes and kept to a rocky ravine, the dry bed of creek.

The shadows grew long and deep, and he struggled to keep up with Wanderlust.

The dog will warn me of danger, he thought—until he rounded a boulder; something large lurched in front of him.

He heard the sound of steel clearing a scabbard, and Daylan Hammer’s boot knife pressed up against Alun’s nose.

“What are you doing?” Daylan demanded. “Why are you following me?” Daylan studied him with a cold eye.

“I, I, I uh, was looking for a lost dog,” Alun explained, coming up with the lie. “Wanderlust here is my favorite.”

The dog growled at Daylan Hammer but didn’t dare attack. Oh, she’d try to take him if Alun so commanded, but Alun knew that if he ordered her to kill, Daylan’s knife could plunge through his eye before the hound ever got a bite of the immortal.

Daylan smiled, sheathed his knife. Apparently he decided the Alun didn’t represent much of a threat. “You’ve followed me for hours.”

“I didn’t see nothin’!”

“You didn’t see me meet with a wyrmling Seccath?” Daylan smiled at the lie, as if it were nothing.

“No!” Alun insisted.

“Then you’re a terrible spy, and not worth the half of what they’re paying you.”

Daylan sat down on a large rock and patted a spot next to him, inviting Alun to rest. Alun was gasping from fear and exhaustion. Daylan suggested, “Lean your head between your knees. Catch your breath.”

Alun did as he was told, unnerved at the realization that there was nothing he could do to protect himself from a man like Daylan Hammer. “What are you going to do with me?”

“You mean do to you?” Daylan laughed. “Nothing. If I wanted to kill you, I’d leave you here in the waste for the wyrmlings. They’d take a meager harvest from you. But I won’t leave you alone, and I won’t harm you. I just want to know one thing: who sent you?” His tone was mild, affable, as if he were asking what Alun thought of the weather.

Alun sat gasping for a moment. It was no use lying. If he lied, Daylan might leave him for the wyrmlings, and that would be that.

But there was something more to it.

He liked the way that Daylan had asked. When Madoc had come, he’d stood over Alun with his brutish sons at his back, and had taken an intimidating stance. There were subtle threats implied, Alun suddenly realized.

But even when he made the mildest of threats, Daylan didn’t sound serious. Indeed, he was smiling, as if sharing a joke.

“Warlord Madoc,” Alun said at last. “Warlord Madoc sent me.”

“What did he say about me? What does he suspect?”

“He thinks that you’re a traitor, that you killed Sir Croft.”

“Sir Croft got
himself
killed,” Daylan said. “He followed me, as you did, but he didn’t keep to his cover as well. I didn’t see him, but the wyrmling did. She caught him. By the time I heard Croft’s cries, the harvest had been taken.”

Alun said nothing.

“Did you hear our conversation?” Daylan asked, “Mine and the Seccath’s?”

Alun shook his head. “I was too far away to hear anything. I didn’t dare try to get close.”

“Ah,” Daylan said. “I am trying to make a bargain with the wyrmlings. They have High King Urstone’s son. They’ve held him hostage now for more than a decade. And as you know, we have Zul-torac’s daughter. Zul-torac has forsaken his flesh, and lives only as a shadow now. He cannot spawn any more offspring, and so his daughter is precious to him. I hope to make an exchange of hostages.”

“Prince Urstone is still alive, after all these years?”

“Barely, from what I understand.”

“And is he even human?” Alun asked. “Surely by now they’ve put him in a crystal cage and fit him with a wyrm.”

“He’s resisted the cage, and the wyrm,” Daylan said. “He is still human.” Alun doubted that anyone could resist the cage for so long. It was said that the pains one endured there made a person long for death, long for release. Better to let a wyrm infest your soul, lose your humanity, than to resist. “Through a messenger, I have put questions to him,” Daylan explained, “moral questions that no person infected by a wyrm could have answered correctly. The crystal cage destroys most men, but others it only purifies, filling them with compassion and the wisdom that can only come from having endured great pain and perfect despair.”

Alun peered up, hope in his eyes. If Daylan was right, then the prince was the kind of hero that men only hear of in legends.

Daylan Hammer grasped Alun by the wrist. “Old King Urstone is failing. He won’t last much longer than that dog of yours.

“In three days, a thousand of the strongest warriors in Caer Luciare will ride north to attack the wyrmlings, to
take back the fortress at Cantular. In seventeen years, no attack so bold has been attempted, for word of such an attack might well drive Emperor Zul-torac mad with bloodlust, and the life of Prince Urstone would be forfeit.

“And so I am trying to negotiate an exchange of hostages—before the attack takes place.”

“But, once we give up their princess,” Alun asked, “won’t the wyrmlings attack Caer Luciare in force?”

“Of course they will,” Daylan said.

Alun didn’t understand. The immortal was giving up their hostage, the only thing that had protected the Caer for more than a decade. If Alun understood him aright, with the hostage lost, the wyrmlings would attack, and by the end of this week, everyone that he knew could be dead.

“This is madness!” Alun shouted. “You’ve gone daft! King Urstone would never agree to such a plan. What do we gain? You are just hurrying our end!”

“The end is coming, whether we like it or not,” the immortal said. “Warlord Madoc has convinced the others to make this assault in an effort to secure the borders. Madoc is a fool who dreams of rebuilding the kingdom. Others are tired of hiding, of watching our numbers dwindle away day by day, and so they hope to die fighting, as warriors will.

“But once Madoc takes Cantular, the prince’s life is forfeit, and Emperor Zul-torac will retaliate. The wyrmling code demands vengeance. They have a saying, ‘Every insult must be paid for in blood.’ Zul-torac’s honor will demand that he hit us hard, even if he must cut his way through his own daughter to do so.”

Alun still didn’t understand. There was no justification for giving up their hostage. Daylan Hammer was making a token gesture, trying to save two lives for what… a week?

“I don’t see any value in trying to save the prince,” Alun said. “If we are all to die, why not just hit them, and let the prince be damned?”