Spine of the Dragon

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Lake Bakal was a beautiful town on the shores of a mountain lake ringed by sharp crags. The waters were deep and blue, surrounded by rocks with small swatches of beach. Year in and year out, the town’s activities were dictated by the seasons. With autumn setting in, the fishermen would haul in large catches to be smoked or salted for the winter months. Hunters would bring down stags in the forests, while woodcutters stockpiled logs for each cottage, as well as an extra load for the town leader’s house. The cycle never changed: predictable, comforting, and traditional. The Utauks had a saying, The beginning is the end is the beginning.

  With the changing season, Koll could imagine that Jhaqi and her family were too busy for social visits, but their silence concerned him. They rarely went more than a week without sending a letter. Surely other travelers or traders had passed through from Lake Bakal? But Fellstaff was a large city, so maybe he hadn’t noticed. He’d been busy fixing the roof on the keep and building new shelves for Tafira’s winter greenhouse.

  After two days of riding, he approached the mountains that rose up to embrace Lake Bakal. The skies turned iron gray and the temperature dropped. He pulled a fur-lined cloak around his shoulders and hunched forward to absorb some of the horse’s warmth. Koll could hear the silver pines brushing together in the wind, their needles whispering rumors.

  When at last he came over the rise from which he could look down to the lake and the village on the far shore, Kollanan saw an utter disaster.

  White flakes danced on the wind, skirling veils of snow that rippled from the lakeshore, while more snow blew in from the craggy highlands beyond. Despite the unseasonably warm autumn down in Fellstaff, the lake was entirely frozen, its surface solid gray ice. The village was covered in white, as if slathered with plaster by an arctic mason. He saw no fishing boats, no movement in the town. Runnels of snow and ice flowed through the streets.

  His battlefield instincts awakened, and he jabbed his heels into Storm’s sides, urging the horse forward. The closer he got to the village, the colder the temperature became.

  Breathing hard, feeling his lungs burn with the cold, Koll rode faster. The big warhorse charged through drifted snow, hooves clattering on unnatural ice that covered the road. He came upon the first outlying cottage at the edge of town, found it drifted over with snow. Inside an open door lay sprawled the frozen body of a woman in an apron, now covered with a glaze of ice. Beside a drooping, ice-encased apple tree in the yard, he saw the snow-crusted shapes of two lifeless children and their dog.

  Eyes wide, Koll pushed ahead. He touched the sword at his side, though he had never imagined he might need it on this simple trip. He wanted to shout his daughter’s name, but some instinct told him to keep quiet. He rode into the silent town and found more people dead in the streets, struck down in everyday activities, many covered over with snow, others frozen solid like statues.

  Spearlike icicles dripped from the gutters and windowsills. The town’s bell tower was rimed with frost. Breezes moaned through open windows. These people had been taken by surprise, perhaps on a warm autumn day. Koll’s heart felt as frozen as the village. His unsettled horse plodded toward the main square, and Koll’s dread grew.

  The town leader’s dwelling was open. Shapes lay in the yard: two larger ones like a woman and a man, and two smaller ones, all mercifully covered over with a blanket of snow that revealed only patches of skin and icy hair. Koll could not see their petrified expressions, but he did spot one small hand protruding from a clump of snow, its bluish-white fingers wrapped around a wooden toy, an all-too-familiar carving of a pig.

  A scream built within him. His vision was blurred by more than the snow.

  Storm snorted in fear. Koll tugged the reins and whirled the warhorse around to see tall figures watching him as they emerged from the side of the bell tower. The strangers had long hair the color of dirty snow and almond-shaped, watery blue eyes. Their gray-and-blue armor was adorned with silver scales. They carried spears, knives, and swords, the blades made of obsidian and ice, the long handles twisted in tight spirals.

  Koll’s glove tightened on the reins, and with his free hand he pushed aside his fur-lined cloak and touched the hilt of his sword. The warhorse snorted, stood his ground.

  Koll called out a challenge, “What sort of demons are you?” Seeing the devastation of the village, he had no doubt he would have to fight to the death.

  The lead warrior, a male with blowing ivory hair, smiled with pale gray lips, showing sharp, evenly spaced teeth. “Why, we are wreths. We are your makers, your masters.”

  “I have no master. I’m the king of Norterra.”

  The wreth warrior seemed witheringly charmed. “Oh, so you have kings now?”

  The strangers stepped closer, each one taller than Koll. Their arms were bare, displaying pale skin, but they seemed unaffected by the cold. The metal plates of their armor sparkled with frost. Nearby stood monstrous mounts, shaggy creatures like white-furred horses, but with smoldering eyes and wide paws instead of hooves.

  Storm shifted several steps backward, snorting. The lead wreth strode toward them. “I am Rokk, Queen Onn’s chief warrior. We came to take what is ours and found this surprisingly quaint village.”

  Rokk looked at the frozen bodies, at the snow-encrusted forms of Jhaqi and her husband, the shapes that must be Koll’s two dear grandsons. “Maybe we should have kept more humans alive. That was a miscalculation, since we will need workers for the times to come. Ah, it has been so long since wreths had human slaves, we forgot what to do with them. And with the land’s magic so diminished, we are unable to create more. Our attempts have been”—he sniffed—“unsatisfactory.”

  Koll ripped the words from his throat. “You murdered them! My daughter, my grandsons—everyone in Lake Bakal.”

  “They were in the way.” Rokk shrugged. “The village was in the way, and we have better things to do with this place. More wreths are coming from the north with building materials and weapons.” He skewered Koll with his ice-blue eyes. “We need to construct fortifications to prepare for the coming conflict, the final war against the sandwreths.”

  The warhorse spooked and skittered sideways. The wreth warriors seemed to find it amusing, but Koll saw his chance. He dug in his heels and yelled. Storm galloped away down a side street, crashing through drifted snow.

  Koll knew he had to escape, to race back to Fellstaff and sound the alarm across his kingdom, to summon his armies. The warhorse charged headlong in terror, and Koll hung on, gripping his sword with one hand. His cloak whipped wildly around him.

  At any moment he expected the frostwreths to summon a wall of cold that would freeze him solid like the rest of the town. But he got away. Apparently, Rokk and his wreth companions felt no threat from him, nor did they care what he knew about them.

  Koll rode like a madman from Lake Bakal and the stranglehold of ice. He could think only of his daughter and her husband, the two boys, the smothered village. The final war …

  As the horse pounded along the frozen road, the eerie cold in the air continued to intensify, turning Koll’s tears to icy tracks on his face.

  12

  WHEN the thunder crashed, Prince Mandan screamed again.

  With Brava reflexes, Utho launched himself down the corridor like an arrow loosed from a longbow. He snatched his ramer, ready to clamp the band around his wrist and ignite the magical flame. “My prince!” He cast a glance back to Conndur as he ran. “I’ll protect him, Sire.”

  Conn followed, though with less urgency, having already guessed what the screaming was about. “You can’t protect him from a loud noise and a flash of lightning.”

  Lightning skittered outside, illuminating the rain that streamed down the windows, and another frightened moan came from the prince’s room. Two night servants rushed down the halls, alarmed by the screams.

  As far as Konag Conndur was concerned, Utho was overreacting, enabling his son’s weakness—and in full view of the castle staff, too. He
pulled the fur-lined cape around his shoulders so that he looked like a ruler. Appearances mattered, and respect had to be earned. How could the people of the Commonwealth revere a leader who cringed at every crack of thunder? He was relieved that Lord Cade and the other important visitors had not seen the prince like this.

  Mandan was a sensitive young man who preoccupied himself with painting and reading, studying maps of the three kingdoms, learning his history, the legendary wreth wars, the building of human civilization. Conn loved his son and heir, but he wished the young man were stronger. Adan never would have hidden from a flash of lightning.

  Utho reached the door first and stormed inside with the konag behind him. Just as Conn suspected, there were no attackers, no dangers.

  A low fire in the hearth illuminated a large bed with dark wooden posts, the mattress covered with quilted blankets. Maps of the three kingdoms hung on the walls, with smaller charts of specific counties and an intricate map of Convera City at the confluence of the two rivers, showing the streets of the lower town, the two riverside districts, and the roads leading up the high bluff to the castle.

  The room smelled of turpentine and oil. An easel stood in the main work space, adjacent to a table covered with jars of oil paints, a palette with smears of bright colors, numerous brushes. The prince’s painting was nearly finished, a portrait of a lovely young woman—although the depiction showed little of her beauty. Mandan had not been impressed with the latest marriageable daughter offered to him. In sharp contrast, a painting of his mother Maire, with her long red tresses, oval face, full lips, and alabaster skin, hung above the prince’s bed, far more beautiful than she had ever been in life.

  Mandan hunched on the floor beside his bed, winding the sheets between his fingers like a drowning man grabbing a lifeline. The rush of rain rattled the windows, and wind whistled through a gap in the casing.

  Prince Mandan of the Colors had a narrow face, hazel eyes, and carefully cut brown hair, now rumpled with sleep. At the moment his expression showed complete misery. Utho bent over him, dominant, powerful. “You are safe, my prince. I’m here. I will protect you.”

  Keeping his face set so as not to show his disappointment, Conndur entered the room. This was a father’s job, but the Brava was pampering the boy. Boy? Conn sighed; he had to stop thinking of his son that way. Twenty-five years old! It was long past the time when Mandan should have taken a wife, had several children, raised his necessary heirs—as Conndur himself had been forced to do. Duty was duty. He glanced at the idealized portrait of Maire over her son’s bed.

  “An Isharan army with a ferocious godling would be something to fear,” he said. “A bit of thunder and lightning are not. You’re safe in the castle, Son. Nothing can harm you here.”

  Mandan blinked as if he didn’t recognize his own father. “Something can always happen. Even my mother wasn’t safe.” He pressed his face against the finemail armor on the Brava’s broad chest. Utho held him with a steel-hard arm, offering strength but Conndur saw it as only encouraging weakness.

  “That was a long time ago, my prince,” Utho said quietly. “This is just a storm.” As a concession, he added, “I will stay here if you need me to.” He lowered his voice, as if talking to himself. “I couldn’t be there when my own family needed me, but I can stay at your side.” Utho looked up at the konag with a startlingly intense gaze. “The attack on Mirrabay has made all those wounds fresh again, Sire.”

  Conn felt an ache in his heart, more for his faithful Brava than for his son. He spoke as if Mandan weren’t there. “You have my sympathy, old friend, but please don’t coddle the prince. The future konag must learn to be strong. He should face his fears. We need to toughen him.”

  Utho fixed the konag with his almond eyes, but didn’t move away from the prince’s side. “I will devote my attention to it, Sire, but not tonight. Nights like this remind him of when he lost his mother.”

  As a boy, Mandan had been the one who found Lady Maire’s cold, still body after she killed herself.

  Conn placed his hands behind his back to hide his clenching fingers as he looked at the painting over the prince’s bed. “Maire is long gone now. Her name is written in the remembrance shrine, and we won’t forget her legacy. That’s the best we can do.”

  “I miss her,” Mandan said in a small voice.

  “We all do.” In Conn’s case, it was partly a lie. After his older brother died from a fever and Konag Cronin recalled the Commonwealth troops from the Isharan war, young Conndur the Brave had become the new heir apparent, the next konag. Cronin had strongly encouraged him to marry and have a family as soon as possible. Upon reviewing the candidates, and gathering much advice from counselors who didn’t once consider romance or compatibility, Conn chose a tall, milk-skinned woman named Maire, who had wavy red hair and doelike eyes. He liked her well enough.

  “Don’t waste any time,” his father had told him in a private conversation. Since returning from the Isharan war, Conn had seen deep grief in the older man’s eyes, as if he still couldn’t comprehend that he had lost his brilliant heir to something as stupid and capricious as an illness. “Life is short.”

  Once they were married, Conndur and Maire set about the business of making heirs, and their lovemaking held a sense of duty. Within a year, Maire gave birth to Mandan, and old Konag Cronin clapped a hand on his son’s shoulder in a clear sign of relief.

  Two years later, Adan was born, and then the following year a stillborn daughter came into the world with a gush of blood, cramps, and pain. The loss of that daughter broke Maire. She insisted on holding the dead baby in her arms for nearly a day before the midwives finally took the rag-wrapped body away for burial.

  After that, Maire avoided Conndur’s bed and doted on her firstborn son. She spent her days with the young prince to the exclusion of all else, singing to him and teaching him poetry, but Mandan’s true aptitude was in sketching and painting. Conndur had tried his best to be a good father, taking the prince out riding and hunting, teaching him archery and the basics of sword fighting. A future konag needed to learn the things that a konag must know.

  Though Maire was still young enough to bear more children, Conndur never again shared her embraces. She drove him away with cold bitterness. No matter how much time she spent with her favorite boy, it was clearly not enough. Maire retreated into the refuge of the blue poppy, saying the medicine dulled the pain in her heart and the dark memories in her mind.

  One night during a furious thunderstorm, a frightened Mandan sought his mother’s comfort, and when she didn’t answer his knock, he opened the door. In the flashes of lightning that burst through the windows, he saw her lying on the bed, eyes open and glassy, mouth wide, skin white. He held his mother’s body, wailing, shaking her, kissing her.

  The konag knew, as did most others in the court, that Maire had taken a deadly amount of poppy milk, but official messengers announced to the people that the queen had died from a “sleeping sickness.” That was how Conndur insisted her legacy be written, and Mandan even came to believe it, but the prince had never been entirely right after that night.

  Now, on another stormy night, the konag watched Utho holding the young man, calming him. He did not resent the bond between the Brava and Mandan, but Conndur had had enough. “Come, old friend, and finish your report on the Isharan attack on Mirrabay.”

  At the reminder of the bloody raid, a flash of anger crossed Utho’s face. “The news will not change, Sire. I’ll meet you in the library after I’ve made sure the prince is asleep.”

  * * *

  Utho remained, and though his strength comforted Mandan, it took a long time for the young man’s sobs to fade. “I’ll protect you, I swear it.”

  The prince looked up at him with swollen red eyes. “You’re sworn to protect my father. I’m not the konag.”

  Utho stroked his rumpled hair. “Bravas are sworn to protect this land, whoever the konag is. You’ll be konag someday, and then all of my loyalty wil
l belong to you.”

  13

  WHEN the returning warship entered Serepol Harbor, the head of the empra’s hawk guards rushed to inform her, but she guessed it was already too late. Key Priestlord Klovus had prepared his ur-priests ahead of time, and they had assembled crowds to greet the crew with great fanfare. Celebrations sprang up near the harbor temple, home of the lesser godling that had served on the raid.

  “Thank you, Captani,” she told him. “Klovus will claim a great victory over the Commonwealth, and there’s nothing we can do but pretend to be supportive.”

  Captani Vos bowed his head. “I’m sorry, Mother.” Her lead guard had deeply tanned skin, and his cheeks were clean-shaven.

  She had her own victory of a different kind, and she would relish it. “Have the building materials from the Magnifica temple been redistributed?”

  Vos nodded. “Most of them, Mother. The bulk went to two new schools and a road project, and the rest will benefit dozens of homes.”

  She smiled at him, satisfied. “Then we have done a good thing, too.”

  Iluris could hear victorious drumbeats echoing throughout the crowded streets and from the tiled rooftops and whitewashed buildings. Ishara’s scarlet banners were raised high on watchtower poles, showing a vigilant eye at the center of a symbolic sun, a reminder that godlings watched over the new world. Klovus and his returning raiders were feted as heroes, even as they made the option of open warfare again seem attractive.