The Dragon Revenant

by Katharine Kerr

  “Well, there won’t be much use in putting on a show tonight, will there?” Salamander remarked with a certain gloom. “I’d forgotten how the Bardek folk carry on about the weather.”

  “You’d think we were in for howling snows, truly.” She paused to grab her gnome, who was splashing through a filthy gutter puddle. “How are we doing for coin?”

  “We’ve got enough to pay our passage over to Surtinna, but we can’t go first class.”

  “That hardly matters.”

  “It does. Cursed if I’ll spend days and days crammed into the common hold with merchants and other riffraff.”

  “Then you’d best think up a show you can do in daylight, hadn’t you?”

  “Now that, oh beauteous handmaiden, is an excellent idea. Hum. Colored smokes might work. And I could have some sylphs carry a scarf through the air—it’d look like it was flying of its own accord. People would think I was doing that with black wires, no doubt. And how about mysterious music from unseen sources? Possibilities—truly, I see possibilities.”

  For the rest of that evening, Salamander brooded over his new show. Every now and then he would make some alarming noise, or fill their inn chamber with vast illusions of red and green smoke, but mostly he left Jill to her work. By then, she was gaining a remarkable degree of control over images, enough so that she was forced to admit her natural aptitude for the craft. Once she snapped a remembered object into her mind, she could turn the image this way and that, looking at it from all sides and moving it so that it seemed she was seeing it first from above, then below. That night she stumbled across a particularly interesting trick. She was visualizing the small leather sack in which Salamander carried their coin, and in her mind she laid the open sack on a table so that she could peer inside it. All at once she felt that she was only a few inches tall, standing on the table and looking into the yawning mouth like a cave. Startled, she lost the image immediately, but it seemed important enough for her to disturb Salamander, who was producing an effect of sunset clouds on the ceiling. He let the illusion dissipate and listened carefully.

  “This is real progress indeed, turtledove. You’re beginning to get to the important part of the work, so don’t lose heart now.”

  “Oh, don’t trouble yourself about that. This is the most interesting thing I’ve ever done in my life.”

  He let his jaw drop in honest surprise.

  “You think it’s interesting? Ye gods, you are marked for the dweomer sure enough!”

  “Well, not the exercises themselves. I can see how they must have driven you absolutely mad with boredom. It’s the whole thing, truly, everything that’s happened to me this summer. I’m beginning to see where … where what? It’s so cursed hard to put into words! But where doing things with my mind like this might lead, and it’s … well, it’s like the day my Da came and took me from our village. There was a whole world just down the road, and here I never even knew.”

  By the morrow morning, the rain and the clouds were gone when Jill and Salamander went down to the harbor, a semicircular bite out of cliffs that dropped straight down to a narrow stretch of white beach. Along the cliff-tops, radiating out from an enormous wooden longhouse with statues at either end, was a crowded scatter of booths and stalls.

  “Is that a temple?” Jill pointed at the longhouse.

  “It is, to Dalae-oh-contremo, god of the sea. Actually, he’s the god of all sorts of other things, too, including for some odd reason unjustly treated slaves.”

  “There’s some provision in the laws for that, then?”

  “Of course. Don’t Deverry bondsmen have rights that their lord can’t cross?”

  “Well, but bondsmen aren’t slaves.”

  “Oh come now!” Salamander snorted profoundly. “They can’t be sold away from their land or their families, true, but free? You jest, my turtledove. Of course, there aren’t many bondsmen left in Deverry anymore, so no doubt you’ve never thought much about them.”

  “Well, I haven’t, truly. Here, were there once a lot of them?”

  “On every lord’s manor, or so I’ve been told. Now it’s pretty much only the King who holds bound-land. I don’t know why things changed, but I’m blasted glad they did. Do you know why slavery is such a bad thing, my turtledove?”

  “Well, it’s cursed unfair.”

  “More than that. It makes men grow used to being cruel and to justifying their reasons for being cruel. That way lie the paths of evil.”

  He spoke so quietly, with none of his usual jests or affectations, that Jill was forced to remember the real power underlying his jokes and foppery.

  Since the departures and arrivals of all ships were publicly posted outside the harbormaster’s office, they found out easily enough that a ship called the Gray Kestrel, owned by a certain Galaetrano, had just returned from a run over to Ronaton on Surtinna. After some searching they found Galaetrano himself, an enormous bronze man with a shock of straight black hair, sitting with some of his crew in a wine shop at the edge of the marketplace. He was returning to Ronaton on the morrow, with plenty of room for two more passengers and a couple of horses, especially if the passengers wanted to pay for a first-class passage. Salamander bought wine all round, told a couple of his less-than-delicate stories, and got everyone talking at great length about life in general and the shipping trade in particular. Almost at random, or so it seemed, the captain himself began telling them about someone named Pommaeo, a regular passenger who had made his last trip over with a rare barbarian slave.

  “He paid twice what the man was worth, too, he told me, just to get him for a courting gift. As far as I can tell, this woman he’s after inherited a fortune.”

  “Oh, so that’s why he’d go all that way just to find a wife,” Salamander said, carelessly. “She must live right down in Ronaton, huh?”

  “Well, no.” The captain suddenly laughed. “You know something? He never did tell us where she lives. Just realized that myself. A sly dog, that one. If you know a rich widow, you keep her to yourself.”

  “I don’t blame him, no, but it’s too bad.” Salamander glanced ever so casually at Jill. “We could use a Deverry man in the show. It would look good on stage, especially if he were another blonde.”

  “Oh, this slave had black hair,” Galaetrano said. “But I see your point about the effect. You know, it’s odd. You’re the second man who’s asked me about barbarian slaves lately.”

  “Indeed?”

  “It was before my last trip to Ronaton, but this other fellow was from the islands. Let’s see, I don’t think he ever did mention his name, actually, kind of odd, now that I think of it. But anyway, he was only interested in buying for resale. He came from Tondio, I think he said. He didn’t take passage with me, anyway, so I didn’t think much more about him.”

  After more wine all round, this time at the captain’s expense, Salamander announced that he and his handmaiden had to prepare an evening’s show, invited everyone to come see it, and left on a general wave of good cheer. Jill managed to keep smiling until they reached the street—no longer.

  “May this Pommaeo freeze in the third hell!”

  “I’ll admit to being vexed, miffed, and in general annoyed with our gallant. Even worse, however, is the captain’s other bit of news.”

  “That so-called slave trader who was asking about barbarians?”

  “I like that ‘so-called,’ turtledove. It shows you were listening with crafty ears. I don’t like this at all. Of course, it might be some sort of coincidence.”

  “Just like it was a coincidence that Brindemo was poisoned the day before we got to Myleton.”

  “Entirely too true spoken, alas. You know, when we get back to the inn, I think I’d better have a look around.”

  “What? If you want to look around town, why go back to the inn?”

  “At times there are better ways of traveling than using one’s feet, my sweet sandpiper. Haven’t you ever seen Nevyn go into trance?”

&nb
sp; “Well, so I have. You mean you can do that, too?”

  “I can, and soon, no doubt, you’ll be learning how yourself. It’s one of the basic techniques.”

  Jill went cold all over, partly in fear, but partly in excitement. She’d been assuming that Nevyn’s ability to work in the trance state was the mark of a highly exalted master, not of a mere journeyman. Yet Salamander’s trance was certainly nothing exciting to watch. With Jill kneeling to one side, and a crowd of curious Wildfolk at the other, he lay on the divan in their inn chamber and crossed his arms over his chest. In a moment he seemed to have fallen asleep, his eyes shut, his mouth a little open, his breathing slow and soft. For some time Jill watched him, then let her mind wander, so much so that she yelped aloud when he abruptly sat up and started talking.

  “I don’t like this, Jill. I don’t like it at all.”

  “What happened?”

  “Naught. But there were … oh, how can I describe them? I can’t, truly. Call them traces or tracks—that will have to do. And I saw one particular spirit that could only be associated with a dark master, a pitiful twisted thing.” His face darkened with rage. “I wanted to help it, but it was so frightened I couldn’t get close to it. It obviously associated human and half-human souls with pain and naught more. Oh ye gods, how I hate these swine!” With a toss of his head he stood up, stretching, then smiled, slipping back under his mask of a sunny-natured idiot. “Is there wine, oh beauteous handmaiden? The wizard’s worked up a powerful sort of thirst.”

  “I’ll fetch some, but are you telling me that the dark masters are here in Daradion?”

  “Naught of the sort, turtledove. Only that one or two of the lesser slimes oozed through here some days ago. I think me, though, that we’d best be as sly as sly from now on.”

  When she went to bed, Jill lay awake for a long while, her mind drifting on the borderlands of sleep. She happened to remember the Dark Sun, the elven goddess whom she and Salamander had called upon to witness their vow of vengeance against Rhodry’s tormentors. It seemed years ago, not a matter of months, when back in Cerrmor they’d pledged death with goblets of mead. The goddess had death wolves, or so Salamander had told her, and the vow invoked those beasts to run ever before them on their bloody hunt. She liked that vow, liked the image it called to mind, of a goddess standing tall, an elven longbow in her hands, quiver at her hip, and at her feet the two crouched black wolves.

  In her mind one of the wolves turned its head and looked right at her. With a little yelp she was wide awake, annoyed with herself for letting her mind play tricks. Yet she could remember the picture perfectly, and when it was time to do her exercises with mental images, she chose the wolf—but without, unfortunately, telling Salamander what she was doing. Since it was an ancient nexus of power on the astral, the image built up remarkably fast, and since it was so easy to work with, she decided to go on using it for a while in her practice.

  Just after dawn on a chilly wet day the Gray Kestrel left her dock at Daradion and wallowed out to sea. Since they had a favoring wind, in about an hour or so the lumbering ferry-barge was out of sight of land, and the tedium—to Jill’s taste, anyway—of a sea voyage settled over her. While Salamander regaled crew and fellow passengers alike with his stories, songs, and juggling, Jill spent most of the uneventful voyage working with her wolf image. Finally, on the last night aboard, she felt for a moment that a giant wolf lay beside her on her bunk, and it seemed that she could almost see it. Although she made the usual banishing gestures at the end of the practice session, the wolf seemed curiously reluctant to go.

  They reached Ronaton in the middle of a sunny morning and left the city straightaway by the main road, running southwest along the coast. They rode for about two hours, until, just at noon, they came to a stand of trees and a spring, deepened then lined with stone for the benefit of travelers by the archons of Ronaton, where they stopped to make an early camp to rest the horses and mule, who were still nervous and stable-weary from being in the ship. While Jill unloaded the stock and let them roll, Salamander wandered away a few yards and stood staring out to sea. When he returned, he was shaking his head in frustration.

  “Well, I scried Rhodry out, for all the good it’s going to do us. He was down in some sort of cellar, arranging big clay pots of what looked like pickled food and even larger amphorae of wine against a wall. There was an older man with him who seemed to be in charge of things. Ye gods, I hope they don’t stay down there all day!”

  By then both of them were used enough to the Bardekian custom of the afternoon nap to spread out their bedrolls and lie down for a couple of hours. Although Salamander went straight off to sleep, all of Jill’s rage came to a head that afternoon. She was thinking of Rhodry, as she so often did, and she burst into tears that were more frustration than grief, a baffled rage at all the dark and magical events that had pulled them apart. Once her fit of weeping had run itself out, she gave up trying to sleep and began to think of her wolf image. It built up fast, and she imagined the shaggy creature lying at her feet.

  As Salamander had taught her, she used all her senses in building the image, imagined she could smell it, could feel its weight across her ankles and its warmth through the thin blanket. All at once, she felt something snap into place in her mind. Right where she’d imagined ft, the wolf appeared, a bit misty and thin, to be sure, but the image actually seemed to be there, living apart from her will. She worked on bringing it into focus, made it appear more substantial, thickened its glossy coat, imaged the teeth and the panting tongue. When she noticed it was wearing a gold collar of elven design, she was suddenly afraid, because she’d imagined no such thing. The great head turned her way, and the dark eyes considered her. Only then did she realize that a thin, misty cord seemed to connect her solar plexus with that of the wolf; yet whenever she tried to look directly at the cord, it faded away.

  With a stretch like a real dog, the wolf got up. Although she started the banishing ritual immediately, her words and motions had no force behind them, because frightened though she was, she was fascinated with her creation. The wolf ignored the ritual, anyway, merely sniffed Salamander and his blankets with a remarkably real-looking wet black nose.

  “It’s a pity you’re not real, you know. I could send you tracking Baruma down.”

  It swung its head and looked at her. She found herself talking to it, then, a confused babble of all her hatred, all her scraps of knowledge about Baruma, what he was, what he looked like, but she somehow knew that his physical appearance was of little moment to the wolf. With a toss of its head it leapt over her, trotted into the trees, and disappeared.

  At that point she woke up, or so she thought of it. All at once she felt a jarring sensation, as if she’d dropped flat on her back from a few inches up, and her eyes were open to the sunlight flooding the camp. Oh by the gods and their wives! she thought irritably. So that was just a dream, was it? Perhaps it’s for the best. She got up, and as she was rummaging for food in her saddlebags, she forgot the whole thing. Although she was so exhausted that she felt drained of blood, she put it down to the long months of strain.

  In a few minutes Salamander woke, muzzy-eyed and yawning, and stumbled over to the spring. He knelt down, plunged his head into the cold water, snorted, coughed, and swore for a moment, then looked up grinning with the water streaming from his hair to drench his shirt.

  “Much better,” he announced. “I’m going to try scrying out Rhodry again. He’s got to leave that wretched cellar sooner or later. Come join me—see what you can see.”

  Through a break in the pale stone the water welled up noiselessly and rippled out, splashing a little against the side of the basin before it ran out the overflow pipe. When Salamander put his arm around her and pulled her companion-ably close, she was aware not of his physical touch but of his aura, raw power welling up from his very being as the water did from the earth.

  “Concentrate on the ripples and let your eyes go a bit out of focus. Then th
ink of Rhodry.”

  For a long while she saw nothing but the glassy surge of water against stone. Then, all at once, she saw a dim, broken picture on the ripples: Rhodry making his way through what seemed to be a marketplace. To her imperfect vision the stalls and peddlers waved and fluttered as much as the cloth banners, but Rhodry’s image was solid and steady At first he looked perfectly well, tanned and fit, striding along and even smiling as he greeted the occasional person that he seemed to know. As she stared at him with hungry curiosity, she had the sensation of moving in closer, until it seemed that she hovered beside him. Then, when he turned his head so that he would have been looking right at her if she’d actually been there, she saw the change in him, a subtle thing, truly, a certain slackness about the mouth, a certain bewilderment in his eyes. Even when he smiled, something was missing. Where was the life that used to burn in his eyes, the grin that could set a roomful of men laughing in answer? Or the half-toss to his head, and the proud set to his shoulders that said here was a warrior, dangerous but a man of honor, born to command? She felt gut-wrenching sick when she realized that his mental injury was as clear and palpable as a physical wound.

  “I know this place,” Salamander whispered. “All that stucco and pink stone, and that view of the mountains from the marketplace, it’s … Wylinth, by the gods!”

  His crow of triumph broke the vision. He let go of her, sat back on his heels, and gave her a grin which disappeared abruptly at the sight of the look on her face.

  “Salamander, he’s going to recover, isn’t he? We can do somewhat for him, can’t we? We can cure him. Can’t we?”

  His mouth as slack as his brother’s had been, he was silent for a long moment.

  “Salamander!”

  “I don’t know, turtledove. I truly don’t know. If naught else, we can get him home to Nevyn, and there’s Aderyn, too—I’m sure he’d come to Eldidd to help.” Again the heavy silence. “But I don’t know.”

  Jill dropped her face to her hands and wept. When they rode out, vengeance shared her saddle.