The Dragon Lord

by Peter Morwood

  “If they attack us, they forfeit that consideration.” Then a wry smile twisted Dewan’s mouth. “What will we – no, what will you do?”

  “Whatever I have to. Get to the boat. Move!”

  “All right, we’ll play the game your way.” Dewan returned the sword to its scabbard, staring at where the trumpet had sounded, still hidden by smoke and the tattered remnants of the mist. “But remember this blade’s still here if you need it.”

  “I hope it won’t be necessary. With any luck I won’t—”

  “You will,” Dewan interrupted. “Because our luck’s run out.”

  They came out of the drifting smoke at a parade walk, a column of eight riders in full battle armour with maces, swords and axes, but no spears or bows. All weapons for close work, noted Dewan; someone wanted to be sure. He could hear the sound if not the sense of the red-plumed officer’s commands, in that long-drawn-out cry cavalrymen used to carry over the beat of hoofs. Despite the threat, despite the menace, he felt a grim pride as the small formation swung from column to line of attack with parade-ground precision, and wondered if he really had schooled these men himself. It was an idle thought, for what did it matter when they were trying to kill him?

  Then they stopped. One horse snorted; another stamped, scraping at the sand with one forehoof as its head nodded up and down, up and down like a mechanical toy until the rider shortened his reins. No-one spoke at first, and the only sound was the ever-present wind.

  “Commander ar Korentin, I am Erdal Astamon, acting Third Warden of this Shore.” That was the officer again, a low-clan kailin trying to make the most of his meagre authority even though his light, youthful voice was an unlikely contrast to his ominous appearance. The entire troop was probably made up of such youngsters, and that told him these men had never trained under him, never served with him, never heard of him except as a name – and a foreigner’s name at that – in distant Cerdor.

  Very clever, and very wise, for if men of his own command had indeed been ordered to take him, they would have disobeyed. Theirs was the old loyalty which King Rynert so arrogantly flouted, first in his dealings with Aldric Talvalin and now with Dewan himself. It was a loyalty based on the Alban Honour-Codes, born of obligations and duties between a lord and his retainers, and something which Dewan, though no Alban himself, respected out of common courtesy.

  “Commander ar Korentin, you must lay down your weapons!” Acting Third Warden Astamon was trying hard to be officious, without success. “You must come with us!”

  “I must do nothing!” Dewan’s parade-ground bellow slapped out across the beach, and gave him the satisfaction of seeing two troopers snap to attention in their saddles with a movement so pronounced it was visible even at this distance. “What I do is my own affair. By the king’s own leave!” That shook them even more. “And what I do now is no concern of yours!”

  “You shouldn’t have said that,” muttered Gemmel at his back.

  Dewan glared at the wizard, then at the soldiers, and clamped down on his anger far, far too late. Just because this officer was young didn’t mean he was a fool. Such words out of his quarry’s own mouth were a gift put to immediate use.

  “But it is, Commander, it is.” Astamon’s voice seemed older now, harder and more sure of itself. “You’re behaving in a suspicious manner, and as Warden of the Shore, that makes it my concern!” He rose in his stirrups, gesturing with his drawn sword. The troop moved forward a little, closing knee-to-knee before halting for what Dewan knew would be the last time. The next order would be to charge. “You-will-come-with-us-now!”

  Gemmel laid a restraining hand on Dewan’s shoulder and stepped in front of him, planting the Dragonwand upright in the sand again. It was like an archer readying his palisade stake and for the same reason, as defence against cavalry. But the reptilian spellstave was much more than a length of sharpened wood.

  “What about me?” Though Gemmel didn’t shout, Dewan was aware from his own experience that the soldiers could hear well enough. “My name is Gemmel Errekren. Don’t I warrant a threat or two?” There was no response. Either the troopers hadn’t been told about Gemmel and were at a loss – or they knew as much of his reputation as any other man in Alba, and that was enough to make anyone fall silent.

  “Hear me well, for I will say this only once.” Gemmel closed the fingers of his left hand around the Dragonwand, just below the carven firedrake’s head. Dewan felt a pulse of power from the adamantine talisman like the wave of heat from an opened stove door, except that this was a wave of cold that clad his entire body in gooseflesh. There was a sonorous humming in the air and the sorcerer’s hard voice sliced through it like a blade. “You are meddling with things you don’t understand. You are meddling with me. And I am subject to the human failing of impatience. So be warned. Leave me alone!”

  When his clenched fist snapped open like the talons of a hawk, the gesture unleashed a great dry crack of thunder which sent all eight horses bucking madly across the beach. Six wrenched their steeds back under control more by brute force than skill then huddled back to a poor copy of their original formation. The other two, Astamon and another man, had been flung from their saddles against the wet, unyielding sand. Both stirred after a moment, but only one got up again.

  Third Warden Erdal Astamon took an unsteady pace forward and tried to support himself with his sword. It was a futile gesture, for its unsheathed blade sank into the sand and pitched him flat again. His plumed helmet had come adrift, and without it he was indeed what Dewan had suspected, a mere boy of no importance. His face didn’t need a razor more than once a week, his dark hair had only a kailin’s single braid, and a lack of clan or family influences had consigned him to this thankless post. But his sand-spattered cheeks were red with embarrassment and rage, and his voice held all the shrill spite of youth.

  “Ride over them!” he yelled. “Cut them down! Kill them both!”

  A ripple of fidgeting ran along the line of riders, but nothing else. Even the unhorsed man flattened himself against the sand and didn’t move. As they hung back, Gemmel raked them with a dispassionate stare that ended disdainfully on the young officer. Then he pulled the Dragonwand free of the beach as a man might draw a sword.

  “Seven wise men and one fool. Watch, fool, and become wise.” Gemmel raised the spellstave over his head and poised it there like an executioner’s blade. The wind from the sea died to a moan and then to silence as if the world held its breath. Perhaps it did. “Ykraith,” he said into the stillness, “abath arhan.”

  Dewan felt a shudder rack him as midwinter’s icy teeth bit at the exposed flesh of face and hands. The last remnants of smoke turned pure white and dropped with a tiny crystal tinkling to coat the beach with rime. Underfoot the sand crackled with the crisp noise of grass on a freezing night, and puddles of sea-water snapped like sheets of glass beneath his weight. Louds of breath hung briefly on the unmoving, bitter air, then sifted down like snow to join the frozen fog.

  “Ykraith, devhar ecchud,” said Gemmel and for an instant the words seemed almost visible in the breath smoking from his lips. Then a sourceless gale whipped them away, scouring the long beach clean and piling a million glittering spicules of ice high above the sorcerer in a vast plume whose apex centred on the upraised Dragonwand. It was a wind to cut the breath from a man’s lungs, a wind to flog clouds across the sky or raise a ship-killing storm. It was a wind which all but threw Dewan off his feet, and it sent a solitary ripple scudding out across the surface of the sea far faster than any arrow from a bow.

  Yet it was a wind which scarcely ruffled Gemmel’s hair.

  *

  The island was an uninviting place. Except for one small inlet and an even smaller beach, it rose sheer out of the ocean, rimmed by ragged talons of rock that tore wounds of white surf in the dark and swirling water. Nothing had disturbed its solitude for months, except wind stirring the mantle of vegetation that concealed whatever dwelt upon it from curious eyes. Not that
there had been any eyes for a long time. No ship had even crossed the island’s horizon until now.

  Voyadin was a deep-sea patrol vessel of the Imperial Second Fleet, hunting pirates south and west of Alba in the disputed waters of the Thousand Islands. The Ethailen Myl was what the Albans called them, a term neither recognised by the Drusalan Empire nor used on their charts. Those pirate attacks had become too selective, targeting Imperial convoys in a way that showed more than just a taste for profitable victims. It suggested the attacks took place to order.

  For all her bulk the warship swept as gracefully as a swan around the headland and into the shelter of the island’s solitary cove. While the crew made ready to drop anchor and lower a boat to replenish the water-barrels, Eldheisart Korradet her commander studied the shoreline through a long-glass. He was so intent that when the deck lifted beneath his feet he didn’t look to see the cause.

  It was a ripple, like one caused by a current or a breeze – or something monstrous moving rapidly beneath the surface – and it crossed the calm water of the bay so fast that few witnessed its passage. But its landfall on the beach made a hiss of disturbed sand and gravel loud enough to hear aboard the warship, despite the distractions of shipboard activity. That crisp rustling of unexpected noise drew the eyes of many on deck who should have been about their own affairs, and meant they saw full-grown trees begin to sway and shiver like a field of ripened wheat. The ripple swept up and up until it was only a tremor crossing the scrubby grass on the island’s solitary peak, then sank into the solid rock as a wave sinks into sand. It caused gossip, speculation, and such a falling-off in normal duties that Korradet stalked across the quarter-deck to yell his crew back to work, but there was no time for that work to resume. No time for anything at all.

  Because the island of Techaur blew up.

  It was a very little detonation as those who survived them reckoned such things. Nothing like the blast in living memory which had flung a dozen small islands off the sea-bed near the coast of Valhol. But then Heaven and the Father of Fires had not yet finished making Valhol.

  What happened here was nothing to do with Heaven, and a great deal to do with Hell.

  A shock-wave of concussion slapped out across the bay, bringing shattered trees, lumps of red-hot rock and a steaming spray of gravel from the beach. Voyadin lost rigging and rolled so far over that her entire portside was awash, but because she wasn’t yet secured at anchor she rode out both the blast and the twelve-foot wall of water running in its wake. The island had lost more than a hundred feet of height, most of it smacking into the sea amid columns of white water like good practice from a shore battery. The rest was still rolling skywards amid a dome-topped cloud of smoke and dust which reared above the shattered mountain.

  It was the fire flaring from that decapitated peak which made Eldheisart Korradet decide to put several miles of open water between his ship and this place. He would leave it to the pirates, or the Albans, or the Elherrans, or anybody else mad enough to want it, because this fire wasn’t natural. A crewman who had seen Valhol’s Hlavastjaar, that great rip in the world aptly named Hell’s Gullet, had come babbling to him about the wrong way the mountain was burning. As if there ever was a right way for stone to blaze like tinder.

  Korradet saw what the sailor meant. There was no outflow of glowing liquid rock, nor any spray of ash and cinders. There was only that single jet of flame, so hot and white it approached a shade of blue and so bright it hurt his eyes even at this distance. He didn’t use his long-glass, any more than he would have stared through it at the sun, but even unaided vision could see how the narrow flame carved the remnant of the mountain like a knife in tender beef.

  No, he corrected himself, nothing so crude. This cut like the blade of a skilled surgeon, shearing with such precision that there might almost have been a mind directing it.

  That was what frightened him most of all. Korradet was brave enough in ordinary circumstances or he wouldn’t be on this patrol with just a single ship, but he didn’t want to meet whatever possessed that mind and controlled that fire. Then, impossibly, it grew even brighter, until it was as if the sun had come down from the sky to rest atop the ruined mountain. Every man aboard the warship heard the sound which accompanied that glare of splendour. It wasn’t the flat reverberation of another blast, nor was it the rumble of falling rock.

  It was a roar such as could only have come from a colossal throat.

  Eldheisart Korradet and his under-officers gave no orders. None were needed. Someone flung the ship’s helm hard over and with that strong southerly wind still tugging at her sails the patrol-ship reacted like a scalded cat, accelerating towards the open sea with foam creaming up from her long ram. She was on no particular course, except away from Techaur.

  And away from whatever being roared and flamed and dwelt there.

  *

  The plume of frost over Gemmel’s head roiled and twisted as if it had an eerie life of its own, and a wan light deep at its core backed each writhing contour with shadow, black rifts in reality where anything might lurk unseen. Strange shapes formed and faded in its turbulent depths, flitting in and out of the darkness like bats half-glimpsed at dusk.

  There was no sound now from the soldiers. Even their officer’s shouts had ceased. All of them gaped wide-eyed at the fugitives they had been sent to capture or kill, a simple mission simple no longer, and there wasn’t a man of the patrol who didn’t wish himself elsewhere.

  A harsh grin etched into Gemmel’s face as he used years of study to construct such nightmares as would make sleepers fear the night. The ice-crystals drew closer together, forming the curves and angles of a geometry that had no place this side of madness. Even to look at it courted vertigo and nausea.

  There was a thin, doleful note threading down the wind, a monotonous reedy piping like a dirge played on grisly flutes made from human thighbones, and as if the whining melody had summoned them, things moved in the cloud. Amorphous obscenities squirmed in a tangle of serpentine limbs, unclean creatures with a shocking suggestiveness in their deformed outlines. Dull yellow eyes glared down at King Rynert’s troopers with heartstopping malevolence and a perverse lust that went far beyond mere hunger after flesh and blood.

  A moment more of this, thought Dewan ar Korentin queasily, and they must break. Or I will. His stomach was churning, sending sour bile up a throat that was already overcrowded by the beating of his heart. He was so full of his own misery that he didn’t see a ripple of disturbed water streak out of the southern ocean and send a spume of spray up to join the writhing horrors in the air.

  Without warning, or any bidding from Gemmel, all movement ceased. The cloud hung monstrous and immobile over its creator’s head for just an instant before contracting into a shape Dewan recognised at once. Reason and logic insisted that this too was illusion, something conjured out of frozen water, made to frighten like the other scarecrow images Gemmel had created. But neither reason nor logic had a place here, not from the instant he glanced sideways and saw the wizard’s face. It wore the momentary remnant of a grin, mixed with an air of confusion. Then only shock remained, the expression of a man who didn’t know what was happening any more.

  “Lady Mother Tesh…!” Dewan unconsciously blessed himself at lips and heart. He had seen something like this before, in the company of Aldric Talvalin, yet Dewan couldn’t comprehend how a creature so huge was able to stay airborne. Its flight, and indeed its very presence here, made nonsense of everything he had ever been told.

  Not that anyone had ever told him much about dragons…

  *

  The icedrake swung its awesome spined and crested head and let out a roar. The sound was beyond imagination. Impossibly bass, unbelievably piercing, it was like the rending of sheet steel and a music like the harmony of choirs, a cry of incalculable strength and majesty that made the air tingle and the earth shake. It was power given a voice.

  But from the look on Gemmel’s face, that power wasn’t his
to command.

  Yet as the dragon’s silvery head came down and around to gaze at him with great eyes the translucent blue of glacier ice, the wizard flung both arms wide in a greeting that was almost a salute. Ykraith the Dragonwand swept an arc through the cold, clear air and left a trail of pearly vapour in its wake. The stuff hung like smoke for a moment before sifting onto the beach like a snowfall made of crushed diamonds.

  Gemmel carried himself well, his studied arrogance betrayed nothing, and only Dewan was close enough to read the truth in the sorcerer’s dilated eyes. A sweat of exertion which had filmed his skin had frozen into a cracked mask, each hair of his beard was as stiff as wire and his skin was like the time-fretted countenance of an antique sculpture. If any vestige of his grin remained it was a rictus of hidden fear, and when he leaned on the Dragonwand, he moved like an old, old man with an ordinary walking-stick. For a long moment, Gemmel looked ancient.

  Then he recovered, straightening his back with a heave as though throwing off a ponderous weight. The semblance of extreme age faded as if it had never been until Gemmel Errekren again wore the aura of an enchanter at the peak of his powers. Dewan wondered how much was real and how much just another illusion.

  The icedrake hung above them on barely moving wings, staring with huge patience at the small creatures whose efforts had called it into being. The few seconds since it filled the sky seemed hour-long.

  “Time stops,” said Gemmel, “as it stands still.” The words meant nothing to Dewan, creating no answers but only questions.

  “What will—?” he tried to ask, but a peremptory flick of the sorcerer’s finger hushed him.

  “Peace. Be silent. Be still.” As if knowing he would be obeyed, Gemmel turned from the Vreijek and glanced towards the watching soldiers, fascinated like small birds before a snake. He raised Ykraith two-handed, with the carved dragon at the spellstave’s head pointed towards the hovering icedrake. Its chill, remote eyes blinked once, and it seemed to listen as the wizard spoke again in a language neither Alban nor any Imperial dialect, though it had audible kinship with them all.