Wither was standing there, his bad arm tucked against his side, waiting for Arlian's answer.
"My lord, to speak frankly, I did not think you would believe me," Arlian said.
Opal had caught up in time to hear this, and said, "I still don't believe it! It's lies and trickery; everyone knows you have Aritheian magicians in your employ!"
Wither said without turning his head, "Ignore her; she's distraught. You may be right that I would not have accepted your unsupported word, but we will never know, will we? What's done is done, Obsidian, and I would appreciate it if you could join me at my home this evening, and bring some of those stone knives and spears—I wish to purchase a few."
Arlian pursed his lips and glanced at Opal, who was obviously furious, but knew better than to argue with Wither just now. Horn, behind her, was utterly calm, unruffled by any of this.
It was not too late to lie, to tell Wither that it was all a trick. If he did not, even if the dragons were not listening now, they would surely realize soon enough what had happened when they found obsidian weapons in Wither's possession.
Wither had no doubts at all of the evidence of his own eyes; perhaps he was close enough to his own death to sense the monster within himself. Arlian might be able to convince him, all the same...
But that would be shameful, to lie to this man.
Wither deserved better.
Besides, Wither could be an important ally against the dragons. Wither was now the senior member of the Dragon Society, a position that carried some authority.
With his support, Arlian could bring most of the dragonhearts into the fight against the dragons, when it eventually came.
And it would come—Arlian knew that. He could not restrain himself forever. He did not have Enziet's patience, Enziet's cold-blooded acceptance of the situation—and Enziet had not had Arlian's need for vengeance.
He had to fight the dragons eventually—and when he did, he needed all the help he could get If he lied to Wither and the others now, why would they believe him later ?
But he was not ready to fight an open war against the dragons.
But would he be ready later, if he tried to keep the dragons' secrets? If he spread the news now, then instead of one lord and his household preparing for war, all the city might be readying itself.
And another possibility occurred to him. What if he, himself, died? What if a dragon came and killed him, and perhaps the others who had been in Nail's bedchamber? The dragons had never killed Enziet, but Enziet had had time to prepare for such a possibility—
he might well have hidden documents somewhere explaining everything.
Or he might have merely told the dragons he had—
could they tell truth from falsehood?
And Enziet had never let the secret slip out, as Nail and Arlian had. The dragons might decide that the spread of the information had to be stopped.
They might not even need to come themselves.
What if they used human representatives, as they did long ago, and hired assassins? That would make it possible to blame Arlian's death on Drisheen or Enziet or Toribor, so that no questions of why a dragon had sought him out would arise.
The present situation, with the secret half-in, half-out, was clearly untenable for both sides.
All that ran quickly through Arlian's mind, but in the end, what decided him was simply his respect for Lord Wither. Wither had sent Horn to his aid outside the gate, and had always behaved honorably, if not politely, toward him. It was Wither who had first told him about the Dragon Society, and encouraged him to join.
Arlian owed Wither a debt, and did not want to he to him; he wanted Wither as an ally in his impending war.
He would not lie to Wither, and he would provide Wither with weapons that could fight dragons, and if that brought a new Man-Dragon War down on them all, then so be it. At least everything would then be out in the open.
"You wish to be prepared for every eventuality, I take it?" Arlian asked. 'To be armed against unpleasant possibilities?"
"Indeed. Will you come tonight, then?"
"I would be honored to come, and I will bring the weapons—but as a gift, not to sell." He bowed again, more fully this time, and added, "Let me do this much to repay your past kindnesses, and to make amends for any distress I may have caused you." He gestured in Horn's direction.
Wither snorted. "I won't argue, just so you bring them." He turned away, and called back over his shoulder, "After supper, then—your cook is surely better than mine, but I can promise you some very fine brandy."
"As you please," Arlian said, "though the pleasure of your company would surely compensate for any imagined failings in your staff's hospitality." He straightened from his bow and watched Wither march away, Horn at his heels.
Lady Opal did not follow the pair immediately; instead, as they moved out of earshot, she looked Arlian in the eye and said, "Damn you, Obsidian!" Her tone was astonishingly bitter.
A few of the other mourners overheard and turned, startled, to see who was speaking.
Arlian looked at her with mild surprise. "I am most certainly damned, my lady, but I must wonder why you say this, here and now."
"You did this!" She thrust a pointing finger under Arlian's nose. "You have him so upset there's no telling what he might do, and there is no way now that he'll give me this mysterious potion! I should have wiped the venom from the bedclothes last night, when I had the chance."
"You would have scarred your hand had you attempted it, my lady."
"It might have been worth it!"
Arlian owed Lady Marasa no debt at all, but he had determined on the truth. "My lady," he said, "you saw what became of Lord Stiam as the result of this elixir you seek."
"You say that was what killed him!"
She, unlike Wither, clearly was willing to reject the evidence of her own eyes, which amazed Arlian. "Can you really doubt it?" he asked.
Opal did not argue with that directly, but instead said, a little more calmly, "Whether I believe it or not, that elixir bought him another, what, seven hundred years? Eight hundred? Nine? I'm thirty years old, and at best I can expect twice that again before I die a drooling, shriveled imbecile. Your elixir would multiply that tenfold! Yes, you'll say it leads to a horrible death in the end, but what assurance do I have that I'll not die one equally horrible centuries sooner without it?" "None, my lady," Arlian said. "None of us can know the manner of his death until the time for it has come.
That said, I do not choose to aid in unleashing another dragon upon the Lands of Man, now or a thousand years from now."
"You say that was a true dragon! I say it was Aritheian illusion, no more real than the songbirds at that ball you held!"
"Believe me, I wish that were true." The dragon wanted him to say it was, he recalled, but he no longer cared. The secret was out, and he would not be party to the dragons' attempt to bottle it up again. "I give you my word it is not."
"Your word" she said, and spat.
Several murmuring voices were suddenly stilled as others saw this, and turned to observe the confrontation.
"My lady, as Lord Wither said, you are distraught,"
Black said, putting a hand on her shoulder. "Please ..."
He did not finish the sentence, as she snatched his hand off her shoulder and turned. "Don't you touch me,"
she said, her voice cold. "Bad enough to be a scheming fraud, but the lackey of a scheming fraud...!"
Black and Arlian exchanged glances. Then Arlian looked down at the front of his shirt, damp with her spit. "It appears I must return home to change my shirt yet again," he said. "Good day to you, Lady Marasa."
He bowed, gesturing with his hat, then turned away.
"Come, Black," he said.
The two men walked away, neither the first nor the last to leave the graveside.
As they approached the coach Black remarked,
"She really hates you."
"I have snatched away her ch
ance at a life so long it appears eternal to her," Arlian said thoughtfully. "Of course she hates me. I should have realized she would."
"You haven't given me this mysterious beverage, either, I note."
"Would you want it, knowing what you now know?" Arlian asked, staring at the ground as he walked.
Black did not answer immediately, and as the silence grew longer Arlian looked curiously at his steward. He had expected instant agreement, but instead Black was giving the matter serious thought.
But then, Black had not seen his home burned, his family slaughtered. Black had not sworn vengeance on the dragons. He did not have Arlian's visceral hatred of the creatures.
"I'm not sure," Black said at last, as they came up to the coach. "As I said, what does it matter how I die?
But when I die is of some very great personal interest."
"Of course," Arlian said, "but would you buy that thousand years of life by creating another ravaging monster?"
"I might," Black said, "if the opportunity presented itself. Lord Wither is preparing for his fate by taking your obsidian blades; why could I not do the same?"
He shook his head. "It's not an easy question you've posed."
Arlian had been thinking of Wither's interest in terms of fighting off dragons that might attack, but Arlian suddenly realized that was foolish. Wither had no reason to think dragons would attack Manfort. He wanted weapons to be on hand to slay the dragon growing in his own chest, when it emerged. Black had seen that immediately.
Black was no fool, and missed little.
"The venom does more than preserve life," Arlian pointed out
"Oh, of course, how could I forget?" Black said sarcastically. "It bestows health and glamor and vigor, grants one the power to bend lesser wills to your own—how utterly repulsive a prospect!"
"It makes you cold and hard, robs you of any hope for a family," Arlian pointed out.
"Enziet was a coldhearted bastard, I'll give you that—but perhaps he was even before he received this elixir. Wither certainly still has his passions."
"Wither is an exception—think of Drisheen."
"Think of Rime."
Arlian stepped up into the coach, then glanced back down at Black- "Perhaps you should talk further with Lady Rime. Ask her about her great-granddaughter Rose."
"I may do that," Black said. "I very well may."
That ended the conversation, and a moment later they were rolling back toward the Old Palace.
Arlian had not seen the inside of Lord Wither's estate before, though he had passed by it several times. The outside was a magnificent structure in the grandiose style of some five centuries before, when the Man-Dragon Wars were long over and Manfort was finally abandoning the cheerless and functional wartime architecture that still made up much of the city in favor of blatant ostentation—towering pillars supported an elaborately carved architrave, and heroic statues, twice life-size, adorned a dozen niches. The walls and pillars were still of the ubiquitous gray stone, but the statuary and ornamentation were red and white and black.
Black had served as Arlian's coachman; a stableman met them at the gate and took charge of their equipage, but no other servants were initially in evidence. Black, slightly puzzled, knocked at the massive front doors of verdigrised bronze.
A footman admitted Atiian and Black swiftly at Black's knock, and escorted them in, taking their hats and cloaks. Arlian looked around, curious about what the interior of so vast an edifice would look like.
He immediately noticed an architectural oddity. In every other great house he had seen, whether built before or after this one, the front doors opened into a small foyer, where guests could be relieved of coats and weapons, and that served to keep the chill of winter or the heat of summer out of the interior; here the doors opened directly into a series of opulent, high-ceilinged rooms—opulent, but unlit. Arlian was startled at the obvious neglect and decay in these grand rooms—even by the meager light of the oil lamp the footman carried, he saw mildewed hangings, stained carpets, and cobwebs in the fancywork on every side, gilt peeling from the carvings, and the odor of rot was unmistakable. As he followed the green-clad footman who had admitted them he remarked quietly to Black,
"I would have thought Lady Opal would see to the up-keep, even if Wither no longer cares."
Black shrugged and did not reply as he accompanied his employer across a marble hall and up the grand staircase. He was carrying a bundle of obsidian weapons, intended to provide Lord Wither with a proper selection, and concentrating on not tangling the spearshafts in the balustrades rather than looking at the decor. The only light in the immense space came from the footman's lamp, and statuary seemed to leap suddenly out of the darkness at him, trying to trip him or knock the spears from his grasp, as the shadows swayed and shifted.
At the top of the stairs the footman led them down a corridor and through a door, and suddenly their surroundings changed completely, from dark, neglected formal rooms to a brighdy lit little parlor, spotlessly clean, furnished with gleaming wood and brass rather than marble and alabaster. A tine fireplace took up much of one wall, and a small fire smoldered on the hearth, though the weather outside was pleasantly warm.
Clearly, these rooms were where Wither actually lived, and he had abandoned the rooms intended for show, turning them, in a fashion, into a gigantic equiv-alent of the foyer his home lacked.
Arlian noticed that half a dozen basswood chairs upholstered in green and red needlepoint were scattered about the parlor, and the footman gestured at two of them, indicating that Arlian and Black should sit.
Before Arlian could even begin to comply, however, a door at the back of the room burst open and Wither strode in. A maid was close on his heels, tugging at his hair, which had been brushed and dressed into coils in a manner Arlian had seen on many vain old men, but never before on Lord Wither. She was struggling to make sure one of the locks of hair at the back was securely tucked into its place.
Wither completely ignored her ministrations as he said, "You're here! Good. And you brought the weapons?"
"Yes, my lord," Arlian said, gesturing at Black.
"Good." He looked around, then pointed at the door from which he had just emerged. "Bring them in here."
Arlian and Black glanced at one another, then followed Wither's finger.
"You stay here," Wither said to the footman, who had been retreating toward the door. Then he turned to face the maid, who had just stepped back to admire her handiwork. "You, too. I'll need you both soon." Then he turned and followed his guests into the other room.
That room was Wither's study, and Arlian was startled to see that another guest was already present—a well-dressed man he had never seen before was seated at one side of the desk, clutching a sheaf of papers.
Horn was there as well, standing at the back of the room, but that was far less of a surprise—the man seemed to have become indispensable to Wither. He nodded a polite acknowledgment of Arlian's arrival.
The room was very fine, with numerous shelves of books and several superb drawings on the walls; the desk was large and well made, trimmed with mother-of-pearl, and the chair behind it generous and upholstered in well-worn leather. An open cabinet at one side held a decanter of amber liquid and half a dozen exquisite small glasses.
Arlian did no more than glance at most of it, though, as his attention rested on the stranger.
"Shuffler, this is Lord Obsidian," Wither said over Arlian's shoulder, as he headed for the liquor cabinet.
He jerked a thumb at Black. "That's his steward."
Arlian essayed a slight bow. "Sir," he said.
"My lord," the other acknowledged. He looked about at his papers as if puzzled, and did not rise or offer his hand.
Arlian was puzzled, as well; he had expected a private meeting with Lord Wither where they could speak openly about the nature of dragons, and discuss plans to ensure that when Wither's time came, the dragon that was destined to emerge from his heart's b
lood would be quickly slaughtered. Wasn't that why he wanted the obsidian blades?
What killing Wither's dragon would do to the dragons' attitude toward Arlian was unknown, and Arlian did not particularly like to think about it—he did not want to see the old wars started anew, and that was the threat made the night before, that if he slew another dragon, born or unborn, the dragons would consider all agreements breached and the Man-Dragon Wars begun anew.
Arlian did not want that—but he did not want to see more dragons born, either. He could not kill Wither's without angering the dragons, but if he could convince Wither to leave any further dragon-slaying to others than himself, perhaps...
But the presence of this stranger, clearly not a dragonhead confused matters. Perhaps Wither's plans were not quite what Arlian had thought.
"Shuffler's a clerk," Wither said, as he poured brandy. "I've had him tidying up my affairs."
Arlian glanced at Wither, hiding a twinge of uneasiness. "Is there a reason for this, my lord? Are you unwell?"
"I'm fine," Wither snapped, "but after what happened to Nail I can scarce believe I'll stay that way, so I called Shuffler in."
"Ah," Arlian said. He caught Black's eye for a moment, and thought he read a warning there, but he could not think what danger Black might have in mind.
"I promised you brandy," Wither said, handing Arlian a glass.
"Thank you, my lewd," Arlian said, accepting the offered drink. He was not particularly fond of brandy, but he was not so tactless as to refuse Wither's hospitality.
He was still in the man's debt—perhaps more deeply than ever, as Wither had never doubted him when Opal had tried to dismiss the dragon as an illusion.
Of course, the dragons wanted everyone to think it had been mere illusion. Arlian knew that his refusal to lie to Wither and Black might mean the dragons would carry out their threat of open warfare, but he still could not bring himself to deny the truth to the two men to whom he owed so much.
Wither provided Shuffler, Horn, and Black with brandy, as well, and took a final glass for himself.
'To the memory of Lord Stiam, known as Nail,"
Wither said, lifting his glass. "May we all learn from his fate." Shuffler looked more confused than ever, but no one spoke as the five men drank.
The Dragon Society (Obsidian Chronicles Book 2) Page 15