Bruda told me Voord used magic! He told me to my face… That face was gnat-stung by a cloud of sparks flung up from the fireplace when the door’s wreckage struck it, but the princess was unharmed. Her feet weren’t even on the ground. Chirel, the big woman with the knife, had plucked up her small and slender charge in the crook of one arm where she dangled like a doll, all dignity gone. Now voices outside were coming closer, and there were more fragmented shouts off in the noisy distance.
“Voord,” that was Bruda’s unmistakable parade-ground bellow, “what in hell happened?”
“I don’t know! I can’t see! Did someone try to kill the princess?”
Oh, clever Lord-Commander, to sow that seed so fast!
So many lanterns were snuffed out by the blast that the figure in the dust-fogged doorway was a vague silhouette, but Aldric recognised its crooked claw. There was a shimmer of sorcerous power around those hooked talons, and the other hand gripped Aldric’s missing telek.
“Lady, are you safe?” Voord’s voice was full of concern for other ears to hear. The telek spoke the silent truth of his intentions. “Where are you? Show yourself…”
“Don’t move! Chirel, keep her out of sight!” Aldric’s warning choked on dust and smoke from smouldering fabrics and the charred, still-glowing logs.
Voord jerked away from the back-light at the door and the telek came up to a ready position. He said and did nothing, waiting for a target to show itself, any target, Alban or Drusalan, male or female. Whatever he could see he could kill, with long-prepared excuses to explain why. Another outline filled the space where the door had been, clearer now the dust was settling and someone outside was relighting the lamps. It was too tall for Tagen, not broad enough, and anyway Tagen had been dismissed.
“Voord?” Bruda had a drawn shortsword in his hand. “Voord, what’s going on here?” He seemed shaken by events, enough to confirm he knew nothing of what was really happening in the Red Tower.
“Be careful!” Voord’s voice had all the right notes of horror in it. “The Alban’s an assassin!”
“Impossible! Where are you, Talvalin?”
“Get out of sight, sir! He’s got a telek!” In the instant he named the weapon, loudly enough for anyone else in the corridor to hear him, Voord used the one he held to shoot his own commander. Aldric saw Bruda stagger back three steps, then fall to the floor. Even point-blank no telek dart could punch through armour, so that left the vulnerable places of face and throat. Both of them were fatal. It was a warning that accusations as fast and deadly as the dart would soon be flying.
If a soldier of the Drusalan Empire could use a telek and sorcery, then so could an Alban kailin-eir who was a wizard’s fosterling. Aldric crouched low and freed his own telek from beneath the layer of garments which had concealed its presence. Then he pulled the glove from his left hand, and the spellstone of Echainon, the Eye of the Dragon, seemed to look at him. There was no flare of azure energy, just the cat’s-eye pupil at its centre twisting and turning to the rhythm of his heart, which right now meant very fast indeed. Aldric slid its steel wristband around until he cradled the stone in the hollow of his palm, then closed his fist.
“Abath arhan,” he said. A glow as brilliant blue as a summer sky streamed between his clenched fingers, rods and fans of light that seemed almost solid as they pierced the smoky air and threw dapples across the walls and floor and ceiling. The stone was ready now.
The Red Tower shook to its foundations and the floor beneath him lurched like a battleram’s deck in heavy weather. Glass shattered beyond the window-shutters, and he saw a fresco-decorated wall crack from side to side and top to bottom. Great chunks of painted plaster fell away, clogging the air with dust once more and the shutters blew in at last, spraying the room with broken wood and a whirl of snow turned luminous amber by the glare of fiery light behind it. But most awesome of all was the sound from outside and above, a piercing screech mingled with a bellow so deep it was more felt than heard. With the Eye of the Dragon pounding like a drumbeat against his hand, it could have only one source.
Ymareth…
A female voice screamed, and Voord sent another dart towards the source. It struck broken stone and threw up a shower of sparks, but its ricochet into the shadows caused a shrill yelp of pain.
“Bastard coward!” Aldric sent four spaced shots through the most likely target arc in as many seconds. Three missed, rattling from wood or brick, and one made a shrill metallic chime as it bounced off twisted metalwork. But the last rewarded him with a thump of steel in flesh and Voord’s voice raised in agony. How hard was he hit? There were no thrashing limbs, not even the slack, felled-tree thud of a body knocked dead off its feet. Only that single cry. Aldric thought ‘ruse’, he thought ‘decoy’, and he stayed close to the rubble-strewn floor until he was sure.
It happened sooner than he thought. The hazy, translucent globe of contained force he had seen perched like a hawk on Voord’s ruined hand came surging from the shadows, crossing the room in a vision-warping flicker where verticals and horizontals kicked dizzily out of line. It hit the wall over the fireplace as square and hard as a siege-ram and sent a flash of rainbow fire back through the room. The wall slumped downwards, shearing near the ceiling as it folded into the emptiness where thirty square feet of granite had become a sparkling cloud of disrupted matter.
Where in hell did he learn that? Even as the thought flashed through his mind, Aldric knew Voord hadn’t learned that spell or any of the others. They were a gift. Not like the ability to play music or shoot straight, but a sardonic present like shoes to a legless man or a beautiful view to one struck blind. Voord was a channel, a pipeline to this world from somewhere else. He was being used, and he didn’t know it.
“Why lie in the dirt, Dragon-lord? Match this petty casting! Rise up and smite!”
The voice which burst into Aldric’s skull was Ymareth’s, its background no longer the metallic rustling hiss he had almost grown accustomed to but an angry shout with all the force of a full-great chord on a pipe organ. What little remained of the window-shutters fell apart with the sheer volume of sound, and the fresco wall crazed with a network of fine cracks then went to powder.
Aldric rose unsteadily. The floor still quivered beneath the soles of his boots, and Ymareth’s blare of irritation had stunned his inner ears so his balance was none of the best. But he stood, crimson and black in the Grand Warlord’s livery he had come to loathe, with the blue-white fire of the Echainon stone crawling along his arm like eerie etched patterns set into the red-enamelled metal. Yet it was the human weapon, the telek, that he aimed at where his enemy must be. It still held four steel darts shod with lead for penetration’s sake, but at the back of his mind Aldric wished he had loaded it with pure silver.
“Come out, traitor. Show yourself.” It was an improbable invitation, yet to his surprise Voord emerged from the shadows. There was no sign of any wound, and both hands hung by his sides, the other telek still gripped in one of them. Pointed at the floor it was harmless; Aldric’s levelled weapon would shoot in the instant of a threatening move. “I expected more resistance,” he said. “Drop it.” There was no argument, no trickery, just a heavy clatter as Voord let the telek fall. “You failed. Your own worst crime. So why Bruda?”
“How little you understand, Alban.”
“I understand you killed him. Why?”
“The dart from an Alban telek killed him. Thanks to that, I’m promoted.”
Aldric stared at him, lit by the fires of burning wood and leashed-in power. There was so much he wanted to say, but the Drusalan words wouldn’t take shape in his mouth, wouldn’t take their place on his tongue.
“Not for long,” he said in Alban, and squeezed the telek’s trigger. Its dart passed under Voord’s helmet- peak by a finger’s breadth, slamming through his right eyebrow and into his skull with a noise like a chisel splitting close-grained timber. At that range, less than fifteen feet, the Vlechan’s head snapped back un
til it looked as if it would strike between his own shoulder-blades. Even without the dart, such a jolt should have broken his neck. His helmet grated against the wall behind him as he slumped backwards…
Then grated again as he drew himself straight once more and with a heave needing both hands on its stubby shaft, wrenched the dart out of his head. The skull-bone might not have knitted straight away, but Aldric saw the blood-flow stop and the torn flesh run together like wax smoothed with a hot iron. With no more need for secrecy his battered mouth and broken teeth also repaired themselves, and once-split lips stretched in a vicious grin.
“You see?” There was a phlegmy rasp in Voord’s voice, as if it belonged to someone else. “No need for resistance. You can’t hurt me, hlensyarl. You many have the upper hand now, but I’ll come for you another time. Sleep lightly!” He twisted out of the doorway and away, and still the power of the spellstone swirled round Aldric’s arm, unused and useless.
“Does use of sorcery touch so much on thy honour?” Ymareth’s voice was cold, sarcastic, disapproving. “Then hear me. Thy honour is mine to judge, and not yet wanting. That honour requires thee keep these ladies safe. How may they be guarded if thee scorn to slay thy foe by any means whatever?”
“Get out of my head!” Aldric wrenched at the straps of the Imperial helmet and pulled it free. He stared at the insignia, none of it his, all of it a lie, then flung the helmet far away. It bounced from half-a-dozen things, broken furniture and smouldering logs and heaps of crumbled masonry, then rolled and came to rest with a sound like a pot dropped from the stove. Afterwards was very quiet in the room. As quiet as the grave.
Was all this useless? thought Aldric, fearing the worst. “Lady? Lady, answer if you can.”
“I can,” said Marhala an-Sherban and coughed. She lifted her head and upper body on braced hands while fragments of what had once been a pretty room tumbled from her back. “We both can. Neither of us is much hurt, thanks to you.”
Chirel’s sleeve was bloody and there was a hole through her upper arm, staunched and bandaged now with strips of costly stuff. A shallow wound the triangular shape of a telek-dart’s point on Marhala’s face told the rest of the story. Had Chirel been one of the usual willowy court ladies rather than the muscular, capable person she was, Voord’s shot would have met with less resistance, and then…
For the rest there were scratches, bruises, and blisters from the embers flung out of the fire, but nothing worse. Aldric took a deep breath, heedless of plaster-dust and smoke, and felt reborn even as he bent double in an eye-streaming coughing fit. He had tried to ignore the possibility that something might go wrong, though it stayed a constant concern at the back of his mind even now. If Marhala came to harm from a falling slab of stone, all the fear, all the pain, all the lies and the death would be for nothing.
“Then let’s do as I suggested before all this, and leave.”
He didn’t need to say any more. The past few minutes had done more to convince Chirel than an hour of his most plausible speech, and neither woman took long about wrapping themselves in yet more furs and collecting a few personal possessions. Aldric bowed them courteously past the threshold of the room, no longer much of a threshold or even a boundary between outside and in, and then looked down at Bruda.
The Prokrator was dying, yet not dead. His fingers were bleeding, their cracked and broken nails digging into his palms as if that little pain could distract his life from its departure through the rip beneath his ear. It was a killing wound, but not enough for quick release even though a pulse-beat jet of blood against the floor marked every minute, every second, every breath.
“Talvalin!” he gasped, and in his voice was a fear that the hlensyarl with no love for the Drusalan Empire or its Secret Police would walk away and leave him to die alone.
“Lie easy. Here I am.” Things might have been different if this had been Voord, but Bruda had given no real cause for hatred except by being Drusalan. He was first and last just a dying man. If there was a way of recognising rank or accent in a wordless moan of agony, Aldric didn’t want to learn it.
“Should have trusted you,” Bruda mumbled. “First. Foremost. Last. Honour. Both betrayed. Me. You. Trust ice in summer. What Voord wanted. What Voord has. My place. My rank. My power…”
Bruda was rambling, passing into delirium as the shadows closed around him, talking only because the sound of speech was the sound of being still alive. But there were coherent details behind the slurring, broken sentences. “You were given. To us. In case they. Got you first. And I sent Voord!” He laughed, a bubbling sound which brought scarlet froth to the corners of his mouth. “Wasn’t right. Wasn’t decent. Your king. To treat a lord. Like a slave. Not right to betray…”
The Prokrator’s head and shoulders lifted from the planks which pillowed them, an effort that sent more blood across the floor to soak into the dust like a wave receding down a beach. “She’s safe. Free. Living.” Bruda’s eyes opened wide, blue and ingenuous as the eyes of a child, deceptive to the last. “Go to Durforen. To the monastery. They expect us. Bid Ioen the Emperor. Live for ever. I can’t live. A moment mor—”
Bruda’s head thudded back against the floor and Aldric watched those staring eyes lose their focus. Whatever the man had planned, murdering Princess Marhala wasn’t part of it. He didn’t know what faith Bruda followed so didn’t know what words were proper, but he could do one thing at least, as he had done for another dead man in Seghar not long enough ago, to make dissolution quick and clean.
“Alh’noen ecchaur i aiyya,” he said, and let the writhing blue fire of the Echainon spellstone surge from the crystal across all that remained of Bruda, Prokrator, hauthanalth, man.
Then he turned from the low mound of dry grey ash and walked away.
*
“Diversion, you said!” Dewan was all but clapping his hands. “If that’s a diversion, I wouldn’t want to be in the same city as an attack!”
Ymareth was skyborne once more and circling the Red Tower, black and gigantic against the falling snow and the firelit crimson of the Tower. Flame plumed from its jaws in great hot billows that blasted the snow to steam. Around the Red Tower, it fell as rain.
All of Egisburg must be awake now, thought Dewan. No matter how sozzled they might be, nobody could sleep through this!
That first roar was fit to wake the dead, never mind the drunk. He had heard windows break all across Tower Square as Ymareth launched from the ramparts with sinuous grace, a dive which had become full flight within a hundred feet. The dragon flew and flamed, yet despite everything Dewan couldn’t put aside the notion that Ymareth was laughing.
There were no soldiers in sight. Oh, there had been plenty and to spare a few minutes past, when they had poured from the Red Tower’s doorway like ants from a kicked nest. And they had kept on running, through the slush and the deluge of dragon-melted sleet, out of the perimeter gates, out of sight in the white whirl of the blizzard and out of Dewan’s concern. He had seen soldiers run like that twice before, and they wouldn’t be back before daylight restored some of their shredded courage. Except for Aldric and Marhala, the Tower was surely empty now.
Then hoofbeats came up behind them, several horses at the trot. Dewan drew blade and swung around, halfway to a defensive guard before he relaxed again, his moment spoiled by an involuntary splutter of surprise. Tehal Kyrin was leading Aldric’s black Lyard and his pack-pony, a leggy grey like the one she had ridden in Alba, and three more riding-horses with empty saddles.
“So my directions were effective, Kyrin my dear?” said Dewan, covering his shock with sarcasm.
“I told you once before,” she said, and the stare she gave him wasn’t a friendly one, “I’m not your dear. I didn’t like you then, ar Korentin, and I don’t like you now, so don’t try my patience. There’s none to spare.” Her attention was more on what was happening around the Red Tower, but Dewan still felt he had dodged an arrow with mere inches to spare.
“K
yrin?” Gemmel stared at her. “Tehal Kyrin? Lady, are you a part of this?” Now it was his turn to receive that cool scrutiny.
“Gemmel-altrou, yes? From the way you look, who else could you be?” She seemed uncertain of how one spoke to sorcerers, and offered him a little bow which lost most of its effect when one horse threw back its head and yanked her upright again. “No, I’m not concerned about politics, whether Alba’s, the Empire’s or yours. Only Aldric and,” Dewan got another barbed glance, “whatever he was forced to do.”
Gemmel glanced at the sky, but Ymareth had swept away from the Tower and vanished in the falling snow. If the firedrake intended to land in Tower Square, this filthy weather needed a long, cautious approach. That gave time for other matters.
“Aldric was unhappy about being parted from this young lady,” he said, almost as if talking to himself. “He said little about it and I didn’t press for explanation. It didn’t seem right. I didn’t ask you anything either, Dewan, but I’m asking now. What happened?”
Dewan had been expecting such a question for a long time, and had rehearsed many ways to answer it. None seemed of use now, with Kyrin here to correct self-serving errors or omissions. With Gemmel’s eyes fixed on him he told the truth, and if those eyes blinked once during the telling of the tale, Dewan didn’t see it.
*
“I have no further questions,” the wizard said at last. He looked from Dewan to Kyrin then back again, and still there was no change in his expression. “At the moment.”
He brushed snow from his beard and brows, a pointless exercise, and hefted the Dragonwand as he took a step towards the Tower. Then he stopped as a light flared in the distance behind him. It was yellowish, as wan and pallid as a midwinter sunrise, yet bright enough to cast everyone’s shadow long and black up the side of the Red Tower. When he turned he knew what to expect, and so did Dewan, but Kyrin didn’t. Though she had seen Ymareth in the Cavern of Firedrakes, watching a dragon land close by was another matter. Even Gemmel had never seen it quite like this.
The Dragon Lord Page 28