Spine of the Dragon

by Kevin J. Anderson

  “But not a complete truce,” Conndur said. “We both remember that war, Empra. Younger ones might dream of the glories of battle, but you and I know better, do we not?”

  A look of understanding passed between them, which made Klovus uneasy. With calm pride, Iluris said, “Since that time, I’ve maintained prosperity, and the Isharan people have thrived. Why would you make an overture now? What has changed? Many told me to beware of a trick, but … I would be a laughingstock if I ran home sounding an alarm about dragons and wreths.”

  “I’ve seen the proof with my own eyes,” Conndur said. “That is why I feel such urgency to change our relationship, to cement a peace before it is too late for the world.”

  “That is exactly what the Utauk trader said.” Iluris steepled her fingers. “While some of my people might be skeptical of you, Konag, I can’t conceive of a reason why the neutral merchant captain would lie. Or for that matter, why you would make up such a preposterous story when you could have come to us with a far more traditional overture. How would it serve your ends—unless you were telling the truth?” She seemed to be convincing herself to take the risk. Priestlord Klovus wanted to shout at her not to listen as she continued. “Even if your stories are true, however, we live an ocean away in Ishara. Our land is safe. Why should we care about an ancient army ravaging your outlying kingdoms?”

  The konag answered clearly, “Because if the wreths devastate the Commonwealth and succeed in waking the dragon, it will rip apart both the old world and the new. The god Kur will return, rescue his chosen wreths, and then erase the rest of his creation. The human race will be beneath his notice. We’ll all be dead, Empra.”

  “Only if the legend is true,” Utho interjected, his voice sour.

  The konag cast a scolding glance at his Brava. “We can’t deny that something happened in the Dragonspine Mountains. We can’t deny that the frostwreths attacked Norterra. We can’t deny that the sandwreths came to Suderra with their own dire warnings. It all fits the legend. We would be fools to ignore it.”

  Klovus bit his tongue. How could an intelligent leader believe such nonsense? He spoke to Iluris, knowing everyone else could hear him. “Excellency, if the konag’s own Brava doesn’t believe him, this must surely be an imaginary threat.”

  Utho turned surprising vitriol directly on the priestlord. “Who are you to scoff at imaginary threats? Don’t your people worship their own imaginary gods and imbue them with powers? Even imaginary beings can be dangerous.” His dark eyes narrowed.

  Klovus bridled. Angry mutters rippled along both sides of the table, and the konag and the empra raised their hands at the same time to quell the conversation. Iluris smiled as an idea occurred to her. “Ah, now I think I see! You want to enlist our godlings to help in the fight against this terrible enemy? If the legends are true, that might be your only hope against the wreths and a dragon.”

  Conndur’s plain surprise showed that he meant to suggest no such thing. Next to the konag, Utho growled. “You will not bring your abominations to our shores!”

  Conndur cut him off. “Not yet, Empra, but if the situation continues to worsen, we’ll have to consider many unorthodox strategies. As a first step, though, I am only proposing a cessation of hostilities between our peoples. We would all benefit. After that, maybe we can form an alliance against the wreths if they launch their war to end all things.”

  At the far end of the table, Watchman Osler banged his cup down. The grizzled old man had served himself three goblets of wine, and his voice was faintly slurred. “Ha! An alliance would be easy enough if Empra Iluris married Konag Conndur! They’re both widowed. If they simply did battle in bed, there’d be far less bloodshed, and many of my soldiers could go home from this bleak rock.”

  Indignant gasps rolled around the room. It was difficult to tell who was most insulted. Though surprised, Conndur chuckled. “Our marriage wouldn’t solve anything. Prince Mandan is my appointed heir.”

  “I haven’t formally selected a successor yet,” Iluris said, though her eyes darted toward Cemi.

  Appalled by the suggestion, Klovus let out a sneering laugh. “Our empra would never marry a godless king! She’s been offered many potential husbands and turned them all down.” He didn’t mention that he himself had been one of them. “She would never accept someone like you.”

  Iluris made a dismissive gesture. “Don’t be so dramatic, Klovus. These are merely preliminary discussions. Sometimes marriages can solve political impasses, whether or not there are wreths or dragons hiding in the shadows.”

  The priestlord’s stomach tightened into a knot of poison. She was actually serious about seeking a possible peace with their long-standing enemies! And the empra had just belittled him in front of everyone. Klovus would have to do everything possible to prevent this alliance from ever happening.

  83

  FOR an unknown time after he stumbled back to Fellstaff, Lasis drifted in a deep recovery slumber, but he could not afford to lie back and rest anymore. He feared that too many days had already passed, that he might be too late.

  As consciousness returned, he realized he was in the castle. Though the candle burned low, he thought he recognized the room he was in. Seeing only dim gray light through the narrow window in the stone wall, he pushed away the woolen blankets. He wore a loose gray shift. Bandages and salves covered some of the worst frostbite patches on his skin, but his real injuries and scars were deep inside.

  His body had recovered enough to function, and that was sufficient, but even so Lasis felt like no more than a collection of sticks and stringy muscles wrapped in gaunt flesh. He had endured greater suffering than even a Brava should have been able to survive, yet he had vowed to make it back to Fellstaff, and he had succeeded. He was not used up yet.

  When he stood from the bed, his joints felt petrified, his muscles an agony of straining fibers. Forcing his legs to function, he took a stumbling step. He had walked countless miles from the frozen wastes; it should be a simple matter to walk down a castle corridor.

  As he made his way along, his vision shrank to a narrow circle in front of him with the destination as his obsession. Lasis had spent so many years here that he instinctively knew where to go, and his feet took him. Time blurred, and he didn’t know how long he walked, one step at a time. He had to find King Kollanan and tell him what he knew.

  When his mind sharpened out of the fog to clarity, Lasis found himself leaning against the heavy wooden door of the king’s private study. Pushing the gap wider, he heard voices, saw a crackling fire in the hearth. As he held on to the creaking door, he heard gasps of welcome from inside the chamber.

  Koll the Hammer lurched from his desk and ran forward to greet him with open arms, catching him as he began to collapse. Queen Tafira was also there, along with an unfamiliar Brava woman and an exotic dark-haired man. Both of them had tattoos on their faces … runes of forgetting?

  Dizzy again, Lasis caught himself on Kollanan’s shoulders. As others rushed toward him, his knees buckled and he was assailed by a vision of cold wind and the blinding whiteness of snow filling an empty landscape.

  Kollanan held him up with a bear hug, careful not to break his fragile frame. “Lasis, tell us everything! You said Birch is still alive?”

  “Can it be true?” Tafira was also there, clutching his arm. “How did our grandson survive? Where is he? Did the wreths capture him?”

  Lasis took a moment to reorient himself. “Queen Onn has him.” His voice was weak but damning. “They held me captive too, tried to kill me.” He heaved a deep breath. “They did not succeed.”

  The Brava woman and the strange man came close, their eyes sharp with interest. The eyes. Lasis flinched when he noticed the man was not a Brava, but a wreth. Yet he was different from Onn and Rokk and the frostwreth warriors he had seen.

  Recalling the frostwreths, Lasis heard an empty roaring in his ears and felt unsteady again. He still wasn’t entirely recovered, despite his wreth healing power
s. Lasis focused on the marked faces of the two strangers. “I know what that tattoo means.” He looked accusingly at the Brava woman with short cinnamon hair. “I know what you are. Traitor. Criminal. Without honor.”

  Her green eyes flared. “You do not know who I am, and you don’t know how this symbol was abused.” Her voice grew angrier. “I am Elliel. I was made into a scapegoat by a powerful vassal lord, then betrayed by Utho himself. He wiped all of my memories to cover the crime of Lord Cade. Politics over honor. Worse, he convinced me that I had committed horrific murders, and I believed it.” She glanced at the wreth man beside her. “But thanks to Thon, I know the truth now.”

  Not quite believing her, Lasis looked at Thon. “And who are you? Frostwreth or sandwreth?”

  “Neither,” said Thon.

  Holding him up, Kollanan led Lasis into the warm chamber. “Come and sit, my friend. Elliel also serves as my bonded Brava, and I have accepted this man as our ally. We have so many questions for you, but the answers I most want to hear are about my grandson. This changes our plans! Our armed soldiers are already preparing a swift attack against the frostwreth fortress up at Lake Bakal. We don’t know if we can retake the area, but we will cause damage. We’ll hurt them.”

  Tafira helped him to Koll’s chair near the fireplace, and he slumped into the seat. Lasis tried to grasp what the king was saying. “An attack on that fortress? A futile gesture. You can’t destroy it.”

  When Tafira heard this, her expression tightened, and she turned to her husband. “That is what I feared, Koll. I don’t want to lose you, too.”

  “We have to do something,” the king growled. “Especially if our grandson is alive! But how does he live?”

  “Let me tell you … tell you what happened.” Lasis touched the thick, fresh scar on his neck where Queen Onn had slashed his throat. Dark walls formed a tunnel around his mind and memories, and he could barely see the people in front of him as he spoke. He explained his capture at Lake Bakal, how he had fought the wreth mages and warriors, before being dragged far up to the frozen wastes. He described seeing Birch, terrified and shivering, treated as a pet by the queen. But alive.

  “But I saw the boys’ bodies under the snow,” Koll said, as if afraid to believe what he had heard. “I saw the little wooden pig I had carved, a boy’s hand wrapped around it.”

  Tafira said, “Tomko and Birch often played with other children in the village. You didn’t see their faces under the snow.” Her voice cracked. “Maybe it was one of their friends. The boys each had one of your carvings, remember?”

  “The frostwreths took Birch,” Lasis insisted. “The queen used me and discarded me, believing I was dead.” He explained how he had barely kept himself alive with his innate wreth magic.

  Elliel seemed surprised. She spoke up. “It is instinctive. The same deep healing sleep is what kept me alive when Lady Almeda stabbed me.” She touched her stomach, showing an involuntary grimace.

  Lasis described how he had recovered with the help of the drones, and then his long and painful journey south through the snowy wilderness. “Your grandson is still with the frostwreths. Before she cut me, I heard Queen Onn tell her warrior to take the child back with him to Lake Bakal. I remember it clearly. I don’t know what they intend to do with him, but he may be there … a hostage, or a pet. Maybe some kind of bargaining chip.”

  “We are going to attack Lake Bakal,” Koll said. “If my grandson is there, we will rescue him.” His gray eyes intensified as he looked at Tafira. “Now this won’t just be a pointless, reactive strike to hurt the wreths. There is a purpose. We need to find Birch!”

  Elliel said, “We can still mount the strike you were planning, Sire. Hit the frostwreths with a vengeance, but the central assault will only be a diversion, with a different objective. Thon can help us with his magic.” She glanced at the wreth man, then nodded toward Lasis. “While all the frostwreth defenses are concentrated on the main attack, a smaller group can infiltrate the fortress and try to find your grandson.”

  Kollanan squeezed his hand into a fist and pounded on the writing desk. “Ancestors’ blood, we will make them reel. We will sting!”

  “I will be at your side.” Lasis felt stronger, more alive. “And I will need a new ramer.”

  * * *

  Elliel was King Kollanan’s bonded Brava, and it was not her job to measure the difficulty of a task she was given. That was what it meant to be a Brava, to offer her service and her loyalty. The prospect of the raid on Lake Bakal was daunting, but she would make it succeed, because that was what Kollanan needed.

  Even though she had never met the king’s daughter or her family, she nevertheless hated the frostwreths who had destroyed that town. She thought of Scrabbleton and the hearty miners, good folk just trying to live their lives in peace. Lake Bakal must have been much the same sort of place. All those innocent people …

  Elliel listened as the king explained the revised plan to his vassal lords, emphasizing what they hoped to accomplish, not just a damaging strike but a search for his grandson—and a rescue. The lords had already been incensed and vengeful, but now their bleak anger was tinged with a flare of hope. They still looked to Thon with a mixture of awe and fear. He had offered to assist, and the lords were relying on the wreth man’s unknown magic to make a difference. Somehow.

  Before they launched the desperate raid, Elliel had to test his abilities. They both needed to know what he could do.

  As she took him out to the courtyard by the stables, Thon was troubled, distracted. His long, dark hair hung loose, and his blue eyes glittered with both uncertainty and curiosity. He smiled at Elliel. “You promised them abilities I am not certain I have. I know what I have done thus far, but it was instinctive. I feel there is even greater magic within me, but I do not know what it can do.”

  Elliel hardened her gaze. “Then we figure it out! See what magic you have. Even when I lost my memories, I always had my skills, such as fighting. These skills came out when I needed them. Your skills will, too. We just have to put them to the test. You’ll find them.”

  He took it as a challenge. “I suppose I will.”

  A large rain barrel stood at the corner of the stables, nearly full after the late-autumn storms. The graying wooden staves were weathered, but watertight.

  “I know what you want me to do at the lake,” Thon said. “King Kollanan is counting on me, and I want to assist with your part in the rescue.” He turned his intense gaze toward the water in the barrel. “Do you trust me?” His lips quirked in a brief smile.

  “I do, and I believe in you. Show me.”

  The wreth man squeezed his hand into a fist and plunged it into the water up to his elbow. His eyes slid closed, and he calmed himself. His hair drifted about as if charged with static electricity, and he let out a puff of air, exhaling as he concentrated.

  The water in the barrel snapped and froze solid like stone around his immersed arm. As it expanded, the ice loudly cracked the staves in the barrel. He glanced up at her, with his arm locked in the ice. “I think you are right, Elliel.”

  His eyes rolled back and he concentrated again, pushing hard with his rediscovered magic. The water melted, filling the barrel and leaking out of the new cracks between the splintered staves. But Thon didn’t stop there. He continued to push with his magic. The water frothed with small bubbles, and a moment later, the water in the barrel boiled and clouds of steam rose up, as if from a soup cauldron.

  Fascinated, Elliel laughed with delight.

  Thon pushed one more time. He let out a cry, and all the boiling water flashed into steam, exploding out of the barrel, shattering the staves into splinters. As the vapor plume billowed out, it sparkled into gold flecks and transformed into dry dust that fell around the stableyard, piling up in little drifts of powder.

  Thon appeared both surprised and satisfied. “I believe that is what we needed to know.” He brushed himself off, and nodded at her. “Yes, I can do what King Kollanan requires.
”

  84

  AS she went after Adan and Penda, the desert was stark and fascinating, beautiful in its harshness. When Glik sent her ska to soar high above her, Ari coasted on the thermals like an iridescent blue falcon, snatching bugs from the air, but the reptile bird did not find what she was really seeking.

  Through their heart link, Glik impressed the image of Penda upon Ari’s mind. She sent a mental image of her foster sister’s green ska, since it might be easier to locate Xar. The jewel in Ari’s new collar recorded everything she saw, and each time the reptile bird returned from a scouting flight, Glik would hunker down among the red rocks to review images of the unforgiving landscape. She scratched a circle on the rock next to her to indicate that she had been there, though she doubted anyone would ever find it.

  The mothertear images helped Glik plan her route, thus avoiding sheer cliff drop-offs, dead-end canyons, and a maze of rock hoodoos. She had enough water for now, and she easily caught lizards sunning themselves, which she roasted over a small fire built from the dry bushes that grew in salty hollows.

  But as they continued into the uncharted desert, Glik felt something draw her onward. She continued to have dreams and visions, guided by her connection with the ska. As she half slept, she saw an enormous beast, all scales, claws, and beating wings, but it wasn’t the same terrifying vision she had experienced in her first real dream link with Ari. It seemed as if the young reptile bird shielded her from some parts of the raw visions. Protecting her? Or was Ari hiding something?

  Knowing she was being guided by something, Glik went deeper into the desert, expecting to discover the reason she was here. Was it more than just to witness a dragon hunt with the sandwreths?

  The beginning is the end is the beginning.

  With Ari flying happily above, Glik kept her eyes turned to the sky. How small and defenseless the ska was! If there truly was a dragon out in the desert, would it see her pet as a quick meal, like a falcon snatching a songbird? Anxiety twisted Glik’s heart, and the ska grew wary as well, but neither of them saw any sign of a real dragon—nor any hint of Penda Orr or a sandwreth hunting party.