“There. My parole. Given by a gentleman. Satisfied?” The edge on Aldric’s voice was as sharp as that on the knife still aimed at his throat, and Garet nodded.
“For now.”
“Then take this bloody thing off!”
The restraint fell to the oak-planked deck with a clatter that was loud in the silence which had settled on the warship. When the bands of steel and bullhide released their grip Aldric gasped at the agonising burn of blood pumping back into muscles constricted for far too long. Despite Garet’s ill-concealed impatience he stretched the limb and flexed it again and again, and only moved out of the cabin when he could walk with ease. It wasn’t just because of his dignity; he’d given up his right to get away but there might be other things to evade, and getting killed because of a cramping leg would be an undistinguished end to life.
The Imperial warship was a huge vessel, doubtless not as monstrous as she seemed to him right now, but before the Light of Heaven she had no right to be so big and so powerful and so armoured and still defy the sea by floating on it. The interior was much as Aldric imagined a rabbit-warren might look to a rabbit, a maze of low passages, low-ceilinged and constricted, each leading somewhere unknown to a stranger. He followed the tau-kortagor’s disapproving back along walkways, through heavy doors edged with greased leather meant to keep water at bay and always, always upward.
Daylight lancing through an open hatch hit him like a blow in the face and he flinched from it, shielding outraged eyes with one arm. It was only the impact of the light from outside that brought home just how dim it was on the lower decks where he was confined. There were no lanterns below, all were stowed in case of fire, so why, why, why was there such a reek of smoke and burning?
Aldric stopped in his tracks, suddenly wary of the summons, and with equal suddenness there were two marines at his back. Without a threat, an order or even a word they hustled him through the hatch and out onto the open deck. The sun shone from a sky of cool, cloudless blue, and Aldric shivered in air whose freshness felt chilly after the closeness of below-decks. Under the unfeeling scrutiny of that bright, pale light, and despite the taint of smoke which stung his nostrils, he realised two things and was ashamed of them both.
The first was his appearance, and the second was his smell.
He wore the same clothes as when he rushed from Kathur’s house, clothes which had come into violent contact with a wet Tuenafen street and Heaven alone knew what else. Unchanged after the sweaty exertions of fight and fright and flight, then the capture which had brought him here, they went beyond grime into foulness and the heavy stink of stale perspiration.
Any Alban would have found that state of affairs intolerable; to one as fastidious as Aldric it was disgusting. His skin crawled as if shrinking from contact with his grubby shirt, the lank oiliness of his hair, and the crescents of dirt under his fingernails. Father of Fires, to have eaten a meal with such hands! He gagged back a spasm that would have spewed his late lunch all across the deck, and tried to think of other things. There were plenty to think about.
Even though the air was fresh enough, a strange medley of odours underlay its crispness. Leaving aside the stench of unwashed Alban, the most powerful was a reek of scorched cloth and wood, but threading through it was a metallic tang like the atmosphere of a blacksmith’s forge. Aldric had smelt it before, and not in any forge.
The man who stalked across the quarterdeck to face him was close to raving, whether with fear or fury Aldric didn’t know. Most of the raving was in a Drusalan dialect which meant nothing to him and from its few recognisable words that was just as well. Volume and tone conveyed enough even before Hautmarin Aralten’s language changed to something more intelligible. This was indeed the captain, even though wild eyes and a fear-pallid complexion detracted from the rank-marks on his green and scarlet Fleet armour.
“Look at my ship! Look what’s been done to it! You! Alban! Damn you! What do you know about it? Devil burn you black! What do you know about that?”
Aldric’s escort seized him by the shoulders and wrenched him around as indicated by the captain’s outraged, outflung arm. The warship’s deck was a shambles. Broken masts, shattered yards, torn rigging and the charred shreds of what had been its sails littered the vessel’s planking and drooped over the plates of its armoured hull. An acrid film of thin grey smoke hung over everything – including what crouched on and coiled massively around the half-submerged turrets at the battleram’s bow.
For just an instant Aldric stood as shocked as anyone else aboard. Of all the situations he expected to face, this was the least likely. Of all the emotions he might have experienced, this was the most impossible.
It was recognition…
*
“Ymareth,” he said, very, very softly.
Perhaps his voice wasn’t as quiet as he thought, or the firedrake’s hearing was far more acute than he believed, or the huge glow of delight that rose within him was strong enough to carry to its cause. The reason didn’t matter, because the firedrake recognised him in its turn.
There was a languid grace in the way its neck curved back between the raised and folded wings as elegantly as an iron swan, an arrogant flaunting of power and pride that Aldric could appreciate. He listened with waking ears to the sounds from dreams, sounds as familiar as if heard only yesterday, a steely slithering of scaled coils like a thousand swords all drawn at once, and the slow bass surge of a vast respiration.
As the ornate, elongated wedge of Ymareth’s head swung towards him, Aldric lowered his eyes. It wasn’t just from respect, though this huge being deserved such courtesy when many men of rank did not. The firedrake’s glowing gaze raked over those who lined the railing of the quarterdeck, and he was the only one among them who knew the risk of being trapped by that stare as easily as any little bird confronted by a snake. No man born of woman could meet it and hope to walk away unscathed – or if things went wrong, walk away at all…
The dragon exhaled, and Aldric smelt a harsh, clean furnace wind. The hot gust carried words in a voice that few had ever heard, a voice which held the sounds of steam and stone-stroked metal, of storm-waves on a rocky shore, of blasted ashes sifting onto charred stone. It was inhuman speech from an inhuman mouth and none but Aldric understood it, as he had done at their first meeting months ago and miles from here. That was just as well, for the first thing the firedrake said was just what he had hidden for so long.
“I give thee greeting, kailin-eir Talvalin. Well met.”
So much for the secrecy of names… Aldric shook free from the hands which held him and they fell away slack-fingered, the marines flanking him struck dumb and witless. He knelt in Second Obeisance as he had done when he first met Ymareth in the Cavern of Firedrakes on Techaur Island. That courtesy was due to a lord under the roof of their own hall and nowhere else, but formal manners always outweighed simplicity if sincerely meant, and Aldric was as sincere as he had ever been in his life.
“Well met, Ymareth-anak.” Then, greatly daring, “Why are you here? And how?”
Flame licked between the firedrake’s parted jaws and Aldric flinched despite himself. He was like a man walking a tightrope, balanced precariously between the perils of ignorance and the insolence of importunate curiosity.
“Which first, man? The ‘why’ or the ‘how’? Speak thy choice.” If a thing so unhuman could have human responses, then Ymareth was amused and gently teasing. It was enough to make Aldric a little bolder.
“Try ‘how’, Ymareth-anak, for I know Techaur and your abiding-place lie many leagues from here.” That caused another quick spout of flame, the harmless swirl Aldric had already come to recognise as laughter.
“I searched for thee and found thee.” The firedrake turned leisurely towards the sea, staring south along the now-vanished track of its passage through the upper air. “Any search is easy when a true guide travels with that searched-for. As the Eye of the Dragon travelled with thee, kailin-eir Talvalin.”
“The Eye of…?” Aldric’s voice trailed off with its question incomplete, for in his own mind’s eye there was an image of Gemmel Errekren with the Dragonwand in one hand and the stone of Echainon in the other. The spellstave’s carven dragonhead had an eye already, only one, and that an ordinary sapphire gemstone. Its other socket was empty. Then the wizard’s hands came together and when they parted the Dragonwand looked on the world with two eyes, one of them alive with the glow of its own internal energies.
The Eye of the Dragon indeed, and a talisman Aldric had carried all these months past. There were many things he could have said about that, and an equal number he should have said. But what came from his mouth was a barely audible exhalation of, “Oh, Father of Fires…”
Which served no real purpose, and in the presence of a firedrake was almost a bad joke.
Ymareth watched him and its thin-lipped mouth stretched back and back in a grin like the biggest fox ever whelped. Aldric had seen that before, in the Cavern of Firedrakes. He had thought at first it showed no more real humour than any other so-called human expression on an animal’s face. He was no longer quite so sure. There was a precision about the way the firedrake’s facial muscles moved, a suggestion that Ymareth was copying something observed and noted by its icy draconian brain which might reassure the nervousness of humankind. If that was the reason, it failed. There was no reassurance at all in the shocking armoury of fangs that grin put on display.
“And now the ‘why’, kailin-eir Talvalin? Or does ‘why’ not cause curiosity?”
It did, so much that for just an instant, just the merest breath of inattention, Aldric’s gaze flickered upwards as the many possibilities of that why crossed his mind. And in that momentary glance he met the smoking amber mirrors that were the eyes of Ymareth, the real Eyes of the Dragon. Aldric’s own eyes met them, and locked with them, and were caught.
Time stops as it stands still. The voice was within his head, as Ymareth’s had been, but this was no longer the firedrake speaking. It was, or seemed to be…
“Gemmel-altrou?”
Aldric’s mind shaped the words, for his mouth and tongue could not. There was no reply from a voice that had no place here, no reason to be here, and no reason to say what it had said, for all that the words were right and proper in the here and now. If here and now there was, for time ceased to have meaning and reality ceased to exist. There was only himself and the two great glowing orbs that stared and stared and never, ever blinked.
He was bare before their gaze, not naked unclothed but naked without concealment, stripped of the screens and shields people use to disguise the truth from one another. He was stretched out before the scrutiny of the firedrake’s gaze, and what was there was all he was. Without rank, without privilege, without title. With nothing to hide the ugliness within him, vices to sample if he dared and others he had tried already, things that all but the very purest carried deep inside, buried under manners and courtesies and outward show like the slimy life under a slab of polished marble. Things always there but never revealed, even to the closest of friends.
Until now.
The questions weren’t asked in any way that ears might hear or mind might grasp. They took shape from the grey mist surrounding him, and those shapes struck and flayed like whips. Questions he couldn’t answer, simple questions which in their simplicity probed with pitiless directness into his soul. Aldric said nothing in his own defence, and could say nothing for guilt sickened him, rose choking in his throat and raised scars that would never heal. Then something snapped. He heard it snap, felt it snap.
It was like a handhold giving way, and he dropped with a jolt back into the world.
*
Nothing had changed. He was still kneeling on the deck, straight-backed as ever, but his face was wet and chilled by the breeze. One hand came up to touch the wetness. He had been crying, for no reason and for every reason, soiled by having secret things drawn into the light of day, yet cleansed as if that drawing-out had lanced an unknown abscess, had purged him and made him whole. Blinking the blur of unshed tears out of his eyes and dashing them away with his knuckles, Aldric Talvalin focused on the world again.
On the ship, and on the dragon.
Ymareth’s huge head was right over him, an arm’s length above his own, as ponderous as the raw stone roof of the burial mound in the Jevaiden Deepwood, and as laden with great age. He could feel the arid scouring of hot breath on his skin, and could smell the heated-metal scent of it. The flaming death it carried was so close, yet he wasn’t afraid any more.
The fear had always been real, whether he admitted its existence – tempering such admissions with mockery to prove he wasn’t really scared – or kept it locked away. As the saying went, anyone who claimed they were never afraid were mad or fools or liars. Aldric had always imagined his fear of Ymareth as heavy and cold, a lump of ice-sheathed lead tucked underneath his heart. Now dragonfire had washed the lead and ice until they melted. Barely a trace remained behind, just enough to dilute fear into a common sense and caution warranted by the presence of great power.
“Know now why I came, kailin-eir Talvalin. Honour awakened me. Honour summoned me. Honour bound me as it binds you.”
“Honour? What honour have I left? I threw it all away long ago!”
“So say ye. I say not!” Fire flashed out above his head, no longer the flutter of humour but an irritable blast that slapped heat down at him like a physical impact. There was an edge in the great voice, a steeliness like crossed blades. Ymareth the Firedrake wasn’t accustomed to dispute. “Hear me, man. I have such wings as will bear thee to freedom, if such is thy wish. Speak and say, will ye escape thus? Speak!”
Aldric closed his eyes, feeling his heartbeat quicken and the breath catch in his throat. Escape? An hour ago, yes, and gladly. But now? Now he couldn’t do it. The firedrake blinked, a metallic click of eyelids in the silence.
“Speak,” it repeated in a softer voice.
“I can not. I must not. I…” He looked up, seeking the dragon’s eyes again, this time on purpose. “I gave my Word.”
“The Word of one who by his own admission is without honour?”
“The right to keep that Word is all I’ve got left.”
“So, and so, and so. Thou art more worthy than the Maker, kailin-eir Talvalin.” To my eternal shame… Again Gemmel’s voice murmured inside Aldric’s head. “To his shame,” said Ymareth, an echo of words it couldn’t have known. Aldric listened to the echo, and at last a flower of understanding blossomed in his mind. But it was a flower with sombre petals, for its meaning was an ugly one.
Ymareth’s wings unfurled, dwarfing the Imperial warship. Aldric had only seen the firedrake in its Cavern on Techaur Island, a place of shadows and dazzle that blurred the senses. Now, against a background of the real world, he was aware of what he had unconsciously noticed from the start: it was far bigger than he remembered. That memory spoke of sixty feet in length, and wings the width of the Cavern. The reality multiplied both, to sixty yards of wingspan and more than a hundred feet from nose to tail, with weight enough to submerge the bow of an armoured battleram and more than enough to make flight impossible.
But then, everything to do with this firedrake seemed impossible: speech, intelligence, flaming breath and even unnatural extra limbs, for it would be more right and proper if those wings extended from the forelegs like a bat’s. Most impossible of all was that this legend-bound creature was alive in front of him. No matter how much storymakers might desire dragons, logic and the natural scheme of things said they couldn’t exist. Aldric’s own reasoning sheared away surmise, reducing possibilities one by one until only the last remained. If a firedrake couldn’t exist in a natural world yet this one did, then…
Who was the Maker?
The answer was so obvious that he didn’t dare believe it.
“I go.” Ymareth crouched low, wings rising up and up above the lean, scaled body until their tips met and crossed, then
poised for the barest moment as their membranes shifted to embrace the air.
“Go? Go where?”
“From here. They will scarce forgive my flaming of their sails, for all I bade them stop ere harm befell. But the Eye will watch thee as it has watched aforetime. As I will watch thee, kailin-eir Talvalin, Dragon-lord. And I will know all I need to know. Until again, farewell!”
Ymareth’s hind-limbs straightened like the throwing-arms of a catapult, flinging its armoured bulk into a great bound towards the sky. An instant later the wings swept down, their blast of displaced air ripping away what shreds of sail remained as they transformed that prodigious bound into true flight.
It almost blew Aldric onto his back, and the battleram’s deck kicked against his knees as it plunged under the firedrake’s leap then reared up again far past the horizontal once Ymareth’s weight left it. Great concentric ripples rolled away from the ram bow as it smashed back into the sea amid a cloud of spray, mingling with rings of disturbed water where the pressure of the dragon’s wings had slapped against the surface.
And then all was still.
There was only a dwindling shape in the sky and the feather touch of that cold breeze from the north. The stillness was all too brief. Aldric had barely risen to his feet, weak with reaction and sore from impact with the oak-planked deck, before the two marines behind him shrugged off their daze and laid hard hands on his shoulders again. He glanced from side to side, looking at the troopers without really seeing them, then relaxed in their grip without so much as a token twitch of either arm.
Hautmarin Aralten glowered at him, all his frantic anger quite gone now and replaced by icy control. He reached out with one armoured steel-and-leather hand, twisted up the front of Aldric’s shirt and used it to lift him onto tip-toe, almost eye-to-eye with someone who stood a full head taller.
The Dragon Lord Page 14