The Dragon Nimbus Novels: Volume I: Volume I

by Irene Radford

  Jack looked around for anything more he might need rather than make himself dizzy with the constantly shifting colors of the man’s aura. Nothing important appeared nearby.

  “We have enough. Let’s go, Fraank.”

  “You haven’t released me yet,” the spy reminded him.

  “You don’t deserve release. You and the mine owners and King Simeon should be thrown to the bottom of the mine for what you have done to free men. No one has the right to own slaves and work them to death in that hell-hole!”

  “If you release me and take me with you, I can take you to the coven. They have need of men with your power. They will reward you well.”

  “If you work for the coven, you must be a magician, too. Release yourself.” Anger filled him for his three lost years, for the pain and toil of hundreds of men who had suffered in the mines, anger at himself for becoming a victim of King Simeon. He resisted the urge to plow his fist into the spy’s handsome face.

  “Take me with you. I’m not a magician,” the spy cried. Panic tinged his voice as Jack dove out of the storeroom, Fraank in his wake. “I’m only sensitive to power. And I sense power in these mountains. The Simeon has hidden a dragon in this region. If you are the magician sent by the Commune to find the dragon, I can take you to her!”

  Rejiia held her father’s gold-rimmed circle of glass up to a candle flame. Slowly she recited the words of a spell she’d devised herself, pronouncing each word distinctly. The language was modern and didn’t have the power of the ancient tongue of Simurgh, so she reinforced each syllable with magical energy from her mind.

  The babe within her belly quieted his morning ritual of kicking and squirming, as if he knew the importance of magic and didn’t wish to disrupt it.

  Behind the glass, the green flame grew in size, broadened and stilled. The hot core of light surrounding the wick took on new colors. Gold and brown, mixed with ruby, silver, and pearl. Gold by itself. The colors became shapes. Reality faded. She sent her essence into the flame, to become one with the vision she called forth.

  Rossemikka writhing in pain and grief. Darville silently holding her hand. Blood. Death?

  Abruptly the vision ended. The present or the future? No matter. Rejiia had seen enough. She smiled. Something in the bizarre double aura surrounding the queen had caused the latest hemorrhage and kept her from giving Coronnan the long-awaited heir. She hadn’t miscarried yet. But she would, and with enough damage to her internal organs she might never conceive again.

  Plans appeared, full and complete, in her head. “I shall demand that Lord Krej’s line be proclaimed heirs to Darville when I return to Coronnan in high summer. Why waste time with Simeon’s pitiful efforts to rule through the coven when I can have it all myself?” She knew her child was male. As soon as he was born, she would arrange his betrothal to Princess Jaranda. That would put both Coronnan and SeLenicca firmly into her control.

  Within the week she expected to hear of Rossemeyer’s king being assassinated by poison. Poison on a letter from the young king’s own sister, the queen of Coronnan. War would follow immediately upon the heels of that news.

  Simeon had already proclaimed his right to Rossemeyer as the son of Rossemikka’s father by his first and rightful queen. When the other Rossemeyer brat died of his long and lingering illness, the ruling party could turn only to Simeon to take the crown.

  Rejiia had to make Simeon acknowledge her son as his heir to Rossemeyer. Once she returned to Coronnan as Darville’s heir, she could afford to eliminate her lover. Her son would have Coronnan and Rossemeyer. Simeon’s daughter would have SeLenicca. All three kingdoms lay within her grasp. She didn’t need Simeon much longer.

  The king had become so obsessed with finding one sniveling little lacemaker, he neglected all of his other duties to coven and country.

  Her father would know how to manipulate the increasingly unstable king of SeLenicca. The two men had been raised together as foster brothers. P’pa knew Simeon’s motives better than the king knew himself. Theirs was an intimacy Rejiia could never know as merely Simeon’s mistress.

  Simeon’s mother, exiled Princess Jaylene of Rossemeyer, had died shortly after giving birth to him. Before she died, she had entrusted the care and education of her child to her best friend and the only person in attendance at the birth, Janessa. A few years later Janessa had married the brother of the king of Coronnan, taking Simeon and another foster child, Janataea, with her.

  Some said Jaylene had died of a broken heart when she couldn’t return to Rossemeyer. Others claimed she’d been poisoned by her midwife, Janessa.

  Lord Krej knew Simeon as a brother. He would understand why the king was obsessed with one ugly little lacemaker when he had a city full of nubile virgins willing to dance upon his altar in return for prestige and safety for their families. Rejiia’s father would know how the little lacemaker had escaped them at the birthday parade and where she hid. Or, he would know how to get that information.

  Ask who protects her and why.

  Rejiia looked closely at the tin weasel sitting on the table beside her candle and glass. Had her father managed to penetrate her mind with his thoughts?

  Rejiia returned her InnerSight to the flame. This time she positioned the weasel statue on the other side of the candle. Krej’s red-and-green aura writhed within a tight case of alien magic. She couldn’t see any breaches in the spell that trapped her father. Where had the thought come from?

  Once more she repeated the words of the spell, seeking the secret of the tin prison.

  “Where are we, Spy?” Jack surveyed the break between two rounded peaks. A dry polar wind whipped down that trackless pass, chilling his bones and burning his eyes. Above it, Corby soared, feeding him images of more wind-swept waste ahead.

  “I have a name,” the spy reminded Jack, shivering beneath the blanket he clutched around his shoulders. His lips were chapped to bleeding and ice rimed his new growth of natural blond beard.

  Something in the silent misery of the man touched a sad memory in Jack. He, too, had wrestled with the ignominy of being a nameless drudge. He’d had to earn the respect of others before they consented to refer to him as anything other than “Boy.”

  The spy had earned Jack’s respect in his stalwart plodding through the mountains, a heavy pack of supplies on his back, in all kinds of punishing weather. Their weeks of trekking toward the dragon lair had left all three of them, Jack, Fraank, and the spy, hungry, lean, cold, and dependent upon each other for survival. Only Corby seemed to thrive in this treeless landscape. He taunted them now with his freedom to fly.

  “Where are we, Officer Lanciar?” Jack repeated the question.

  “I don’t know where we are. Somewhere in SeLenicca, but so much of this land has been logged off and then eroded, all the landmarks look the same.”

  “Do you sense the dragon anywhere near?” Jack knew the lair had to be in the hills, at the bottom of a cliff with a wide waterfall. That kind of landscape didn’t occur in the rolling plains and river valleys of SeLenicca proper.

  “Sensing people with talent is easier. South, I think,” Lanciar grumbled. He sank deeper into the folds of his blanket. There was no cover anywhere to shelter them from the punishing wind.

  Lanciar’s mind remained mostly closed to Jack. The secrets behind his mental armor still troubled Jack. Respect was there, but trust was a long time in coming.

  “We should have stayed at the mine.” Fraank edged closer to Lanciar seeking warmth or a windbreak. He didn’t look well. His years in the mine had taken their toll.

  “You sense power in people of talent,” Jack turned his attention back to Lanciar. “Dragons emit a kind of power. Look for power in the air, in the ground, in the living rocks of these mountains.”

  “Look yourself. You’re the magician,” Lanciar snarled.

  “I cannot gather dragon magic,” Jack admitted reluctantly.

  “Then why bother seeking the dragon? You should have run back to Coronna
n where you belong. Or let me take you to King Simeon. Maybe he’ll take you to the precious dragon.”

  “Shayla is the only hope for saving Coronnan from Simeon. I must find a way to rebuild the Commune and erect the magic border again,” Jack affirmed. For the memory of his friends, Jaylor and Brevelan, and his beloved mentor, Baamin. “That is my quest. I must complete it in order to complete myself.”

  Though once he’d done that, he’d be an exiled rogue magician or a nameless drudge again. Because he couldn’t gather dragon magic.

  “Come, we must find shelter before the sun sets. I believe I see a cave up there,” Jack pointed to a dark spot in the hills that guarded the pass. “And enough scrub to build a fire.”

  “ ’Tis early yet. We can traverse the pass before nightfall. There is bound to be shelter on the other side,” Lanciar argued. “Villages used to guard the western end of passes. Not all of them were deserted when the timber industry died.”

  “I have much to teach you tonight, Officer Lanciar.” Before they reached the bedraggled village Corby saw on the other side. “Tonight, by the light of a campfire, you will learn to center yourself and align your body to the pole. Thus anchored, your spirit will be free to search for magic in all its forms. Tonight you will find the dragon.”

  One thousand pins and counting. Katrina stared at her mother’s lace shawl stretched out on an inclined work board. The cream-colored wood pulp paper beneath the lace was marked off in a precise grid to help her determine the proper angle of pin placement. The intricate lace did not conform to any predetermined angle.

  Katrina’s head swam with geometrical equations, trying to discover the design. T’chon lace was worked on precise forty-five degree angles. Net-ground laces flowed at a wider angle. This piece defied geometry. She knew that science as well as her mother, or any lacemaker before her. She hadn’t been taught to read but she knew mathematics.

  She stretched her back and rose from her straight chair in the corner of Neeles Brunix’s office. The owner was off on some errand, so she had the ground floor room to herself. She shuddered in memory of the night he’d taken her maidenhood. Her skin crawled whenever she thought of his hands on her face, breast, between her legs . . .

  She deliberately pushed aside her revulsion. Dwelling on Brunix wouldn’t draw a pattern from the shawl. Without his watchful eye pinning her to her chair, Katrina took the opportunity to walk around her new workstation and stare at the obstinate piece of lace from a different angle.

  Spring sunshine filtered in through the two high windows covered with a mosaic of mica flakes. Fresh white paint enhanced that light and relieved the strain on her eyes. A stray beam broke through the heavy windows setting the lustrous silk of the shawl aglow in three dimensions. An entire garden of abstract flowers jumped to life before Katrina’s eyes.

  She tried to remember the weeks M’ma had spent designing the shawl. Tattia had tried to keep her work a secret, but during those days, the entire family had huddled together in the upstairs workroom for warmth and light.

  A picture of Tattia bent over her design board flashed before Katrina’s eyes. “She didn’t use a straight edge! She drew pictures. Pictures of flowers connected by a variety of entwined braids and nets.”

  Inspired by this insight, Katrina perched over the board again, removing all of the one thousand and more pins she had used as markers. Carefully she placed each of the precious pins into a magnetized box. A new piece of paper beneath the lace and she started over.

  Pins in the top corners and along the fanned edge across the lace. Then several more along the side edges to hold the thing in place. With a new vision of how the design flowed she traced the outside of each flower with pins at logical points. The center of each motif received appropriate pins, too.

  Tediously she traced each flower, following the lines of thread rather than any predetermined geometric pattern. The outside edges came easily. The inside motifs didn’t seem to conform.

  Again Katrina jumped up and paced the office, studying the lace from several new angles. The floral centers appeared too angular, too regular to match the rest of the design. They were almost like the ancient runes carved into the walls of the temple. Runes that represented the language before the Stargods brought the modern alphabet. The ancient writing was the foundation of the pictorial ledger language all women were taught to keep their household accounts. A forgotten language deemed too unimportant for those few men who needed to read.

  The rune in the lower right-hand corner suggested something illegal. The one in the upper right-hand corner showed ashes. She knew the symbol as part of the recipe for making soap—ashes and lye. But it was different somehow. A mood of menace lingered in the runes.

  How strange of Tattia to put such symbols in a gift for the queen!

  The sun shifted. A shadow fell across the lace obscuring her insight.

  ‘S’murgh it!” she cursed. “I need better light.”

  “You may not take the board to the workroom upstairs. I will not have the other lacemakers peering over your shoulder at the lace and gossiping about my newest venture.” Owner Brunix placed a long hand on her shoulder and squeezed gently, affectionately.

  “Oh, you startled me.” Katrina jumped away from him. The hair on her arms and the back of her neck stood up in instinctive fear of his touch. She had been so lost in her work she hadn’t noticed the sounds of doors opening and closing or footsteps.

  Brunix frowned at the distance she put between them. He didn’t say anything further until he sat behind his desk, in a position of unopposable authority. “You may carry your work to my apartment.” The top floor windows of thinnest mica and a skylight of real glass—coarse and mottled but genuine enough to bring the sunshine inside—offered the best visibility in the district. How many fortunes had he spent on that luxury?

  Katrina hesitated, reluctant to agree with him. He was right about the lighting. But she hoped she had escaped the necessity of ever returning to the intimacy of his private rooms. She looked at her board and the waning shaft of sunlight that now spread across his desk.

  “I’ll not press you to share my bed until the piece is finished. You may work in silent peace.” He scowled.

  His eyes were on an accounting ledger rather than on her, so she couldn’t tell whether she or the figures displeased him. She peeked at the ledger, upside down. Unlike her father and other merchants, Brunix used the feminine runic language to keep his books. Where had he learned it? Not from any normal teacher.

  Without a word she gathered her supplies under her arm. “You could thank me,” Brunix reminded her, still not looking up.

  “For what?”

  “For saving your eyes from strain. For delivering you from King Simeon, twice.”

  Katrina remained silent.

  “His Majesty thought the humiliation of being owned by a half-breed outlander would be greater than suffering through his perverted rituals.” Brunix peered at her speculatively. “The Simeon thought you would choose him over me. He made the mistake of underestimating you. I will not make the same mistake. I find great satisfaction in owning you. Me, a dark-eyed half-breed owning a true-blood woman. I own a Kaantille, one of the greatest lacemakers in the world, and all of your work belongs to me. All of it!”

  “You own my work, Owner Brunix. You will never own my soul. I couldn’t respond to you, because you demanded it as your right, something you bought and paid for. When you ask me out of love, I will reconsider.” She put more distance between them.

  “Will you, really?” He stepped between Katrina and the door so fast she barely saw him move. “Will you give me your soul if I ask out of love?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. I said I would reconsider if you could ever raise your self-esteem high enough to risk asking .” She looked up at his tight face. He stood head and shoulders taller than she—another indication of his outland blood. She didn’t let his height or his authority intimidate her.

  “Get out of my sight
. Get up into the loft and work on that blasted shawl until you go blind. Work until your fingers are bloody and your back permanently curved. For I’ll not release you from bondage until no one has any further use for your mind, your hands, or your body. Even The Simeon won’t be able to use you.”

  Chapter 20

  ‘Breathe in three counts, hold three, out three, hold three. Again,” Jack instructed Officer Lanciar as he himself engaged the first stages of a trance. He wasn’t about to send this unknown sensitive in search of a dragon alone. Jack intended to be right on his heels—psychically speaking.

  “Still your mind. Breathe in, hold, breathe out. Again. Let go of your thoughts. Drift free of your body,” he continued the monotonous litany.

  The moon rose high and bright above the canyon. Frigid winds continued to howl and moan. Inside the long, narrow cave the three men were snug, almost comfortably warm. Corby crouched on a protruding ledge, head under his wing; oblivious to the proceedings. Fraank snored quietly on the other side of their campfire. The older man had feigned boredom from the long and repetitious exercises to cover his exhaustion. The mines had taken their toll on his lungs as well as his strength. If Jack didn’t find the dragon soon, Fraank might not live to return to his daughter.

  Lanciar fidgeted, like any first-year apprentice learning the basics of magic. Mental and physical disciplines were things he’d learned during his years in the army. But this control over heartbeat and breath was taxing his patience.

  A vibration of power rippled from Lanciar. He had achieved the first stage of trance. His latent magic was set free of mental inhibitions. Jack’s body hummed, seeking a resonance with the other man. When they were tuned, Jack was ready to follow wherever Lanciar led.