Dragon Hunters

by Marc Turner

  Farrell sipped his wine. “Even a dragon’s armor has weak points: its belly, its eyes, its mouth. The neck too—when a dragon turns its head, small spaces can open up between the neck plates.”

  “Even if you hit one of those spaces, though, the blow will feel like a pinprick to a creature that size.”

  “If you’re using normal missiles, yes.” Farrell gestured to a weapons rack behind him. “Some of the arrows we’re carrying, though, are invested with sorcery—the black-shafted ones with water-magic, the white-shafted ones with air-magic. Find a gap between two of the dragon’s scales with these, and the sorcery released into the creature’s flesh will tear the scales clear from its body. Put an arrow in the beast’s eye, and you’ll blow it out of its socket.”

  Agenta saw again the trader ship destroyed off Gilgamar. “Assuming the dragon lets you live long enough to get your shot off.”

  “That’s where Orsan comes in. A powerful water-mage can blind a dragon by vaporizing the sea in front of it, or create currents to flip the creature onto its back and thus expose its belly.”

  The kalischa studied the merchant. “For someone who has taken part in Dragon Day only once before, you seem to know a lot about it.”

  “That time I was telling you about, when I was invited onto Ellifah’s flagship, I got stuck next to some Dragon Day veteran who insisted on boring me rigid with his ramblings.”

  “I know how you must have felt.”

  Farrell roared his laughter again, and Agenta smiled in spite of herself. Turning to the weapons rack behind her, she took out a white-shafted arrow from a quiver.

  “It’s light.”

  “The air-magic invested in it makes it fly farther than a normal arrow. Archers using the arrows for the first time have difficulty adjusting their aim.”

  “A bad workman always blames his tools.”

  The merchant’s eyebrows lifted. “You are skilled with a bow?”

  Before Agenta could reply, a bow was thrust in front of her. She looked across to see a Storm Guard in a red head scarf. His eyes were bright with challenge. The kalischa hesitated. She had no wish to draw the attention of the other passengers again, but nor was she one to back down from a challenge.

  She nodded to the Storm Guard. With a practiced motion, he slipped a string over the ends of the bow. Agenta passed her wineglass to Farrell, then took the offered weapon. It was a composite bow with a handgrip of honey-colored wood. Two strips of alamandra horn were glued to the front, and a strip of sinew was attached to the back. A memory came to Agenta of the last time she’d held such a weapon, a month before her brother’s death. The two of them had been on the Key Tower, shooting at the starbeaks diving for fish in the Ribbon Sea. Late in the day a bird the kalischa was aiming at aborted its dive, but Agenta had kept the bowstring drawn to her ear in readiness for another target. Such was the weight of the draw that by the time the next bird began its descent, her arm was shaking. When she finally fired her arrow it fell so short that Zelin had collapsed in gales of laughter. Agenta had laughed too. It had been hard not to laugh when Zelin was around.

  She looked again at the white arrow. The shaft was scored with glyphs, and her flesh tingled as she brushed a finger over them. “The carvings will have warped the shaft.”

  “Yet the air-magic invested in the arrow will ensure it flies true,” Farrell said.

  “Assuming the air-mage who did the investing is worth his salt.”

  “Getting our excuses in early, are we?”

  Agenta shot him a look. She’d deserved that, she supposed, what with her line about bad workmen. “I’ll need a target,” she said, lifting the white arrow to her bowstring.

  From the corner of her eye she saw the soldier with the red head scarf go still. He spat over the rail and said, “If it’s all the same to you, m’Lady, I’d rather you didn’t. Use that arrow, I mean. There’s precious few of them on board, and they’re best left for the dragon if we meet one.”

  The kalischa shrugged, then returned the arrow to its quarrel and selected another with a standard shaft. “I still need a target.”

  Farrell scanned the sea. “There!”

  At first Agenta thought he was indicating the Crest, a stone’s throw off the port quarter and falling farther behind with each heartbeat. Then she noticed a fin break the waves fifty armspans away, just beyond the ripples of foam created by the Icewing’s passage. A briar shark, judging by the shape of the fin, and a big one too. A simple enough shot, then, provided the fish remained on its current course parallel to the Icewing.

  Agenta tested the bow’s draw-weight—heavy, but not as heavy as the weapon she’d used on the Key Tower that day. She nocked her arrow to the string and took a moment to assess the conditions. The wind was from the north and west. With the Icewing riding a wave of water-magic, the pitch of the deck was less pronounced than it would have been had the ship’s bow been cutting through the waves. The slow, rhythmic movement would make the shot only marginally more difficult than if she’d been standing on dry land.

  Pulling back the bowstring she sighted on her target, squinting against the glare of the sun on the sea.

  Then she let fly.

  Her arrow splashed into the water three paces beyond the shark and as many behind.

  “Not bad,” Farrell said, his voice even. He put the two wineglasses down on the deck and held out a hand for the bow.

  “That was only a sighter,” Agenta snapped, snatching another arrow from the quiver in the weapons rack. She checked its shaft for imperfections before nocking it to the bowstring. Picturing the flight of her first arrow, she realized she’d underestimated the power of the bow. She’d also overcompensated for the wind, for while the Icewing’s sails were bulging, that was due more to Selis’s air-magic than to the force of the breeze. She adjusted her aim. A stillness had settled on the main deck, and she could feel the Storm Guards’ gazes on her. She blinked sweat from her eyes as she pulled on the bowstring—

  The shark dived beneath the waves.

  Laughter rang out to Agenta’s right, and she lowered the bow. Her cheeks felt hot. Unwilling to meet the looks of those around her, she kept her gaze focused on the spot where the fish had vanished.

  Farrell pointed. “Look!”

  The shark had resurfaced a dozen paces farther from the ship and forward of its last position. But the shot was still on. Composing herself, Agenta tugged on the bowstring again, aiming for the point where the fish’s fin met its body. She blocked out the sensation of the arrow’s flight against her cheek, the bite of the bowstring on her fingers.

  The shark’s fin dipped beneath the water once more, only to reappear an instant later in the same place.

  Stay still, damn you!

  A muscle in Agenta’s left arm twitched. She’d been holding the bowstring at full draw for twenty heartbeats, and her strength was beginning to fail. If she let fly now she risked embarrassing herself as she had with her brother, and yet would it be any less humiliating if she declined the shot?

  Taking a breath, she released it at the same time she released the bowstring.

  From the moment the arrow left the weapon Agenta knew she had missed her target. Biting back a curse, she watched the missile flash over the sea. She lost sight of it in the dazzle of the sun and was about to turn away when she saw a puff of spray beside the shark.

  The fish sank beneath the waves again.

  But not before Agenta had glimpsed the arrow protruding from its flank. The water where the shark had been swimming was now tinged red.

  Sardonic cheers sounded from the Storm Guards round her, and the soldier with the head scarf gave a whistle of appreciation. “I’ll be damned.”

  Agenta’s mouth had dropped open. She shut it again, then looked hopefully at her father on the aft deck. Either Rethell hadn’t seen the shot, though, or he wasn’t acknowledging it, for his attention appeared fixed on Samel.

  “Impressive,” Farrell said. The kalischa offered him th
e bow, but he gestured to the now-empty waves. “It seems the shark has grown tired of the game.”

  “I’m sure you’ll get a chance to test your aim once the Dragon Gate goes up. Whatever dragon passes beneath it will make for an easy target.”

  Farrell’s smile was rueful. “You forget, with the Icewing setting off so late, we’ll be left with a starting berth far from the gate. Odds are we won’t even see a dragon today.”

  * * *

  As Kempis entered the temple’s porch, the high priest’s voice filled his ears. From what the septia had heard at the Watchstation, the man was committed to the liberation of Olaire’s lowborn, yet in his pompous tone Kempis heard only another blueblood in the making—someone who wanted not to overthrow the elite but to take their place. His sermon hadn’t stopped during the Kerralai’s attack on the shrine. Evidently he was confident in the efficacy of his temple’s wards, but then why was Kempis still unable to detect any trace of those defenses?

  He passed into the anteroom beyond the porch. In the far wall was a rectangular opening of light through which he could see a courtyard filled with a crowd of seated figures. The corner of the anteroom ahead and to Kempis’s right was occupied by a statue of a masked, alamandra-legged figure, while to his left …

  The septia’s breath hissed out. Lying on the floor next to an overturned bench was Bright Eyes, her arms folded across her chest as if her body had been arranged for a funeral bier. Her blue-tinged skin and perfectly still chest told Kempis she had passed through Shroud’s Gate, yet there was no mark on her corpse to show how she had died. Beside her knelt a priestess wearing a mask of white wood. The woman’s right hand rested on the assassin’s chest, her fingers drumming against her breastbone. When she looked at Kempis, the brown eyes visible through her mask’s eye slits sparkled with humor. And why not? What could be funnier than having a stranger blunder into your temple and die in your arms?

  Unless, of course, Bright Eyes was no stranger. Could the assassin be a follower of the Lord of Hidden Faces?

  Kempis gestured for Sniffer to wait at the doorway, then approached the priestess.

  “She is dead,” the woman said to him.

  “Explains the not-breathing thing,” Kempis replied. “What happened here?”

  “Your friend attempted to travel from this place to another realm. But the distances between the worlds were too great.”

  “She thought there was a portal here? Why?”

  The priestess’s fingers fluttered. “Why indeed?”

  Kempis slammed his sword into its scabbard. He should have been pleased to find Bright Eyes dead, but there was something in the masked woman’s manner that left him feeling like he’d won a hand at flush only to discover the pot was empty. Was it possible she’d played some part in the assassin’s death? But how, exactly? It wasn’t as if she could have tricked the assassin into believing a gateway existed when there was none.

  Kempis’s gaze shifted from the priestess to Bright Eyes’s corpse, then back again. Something about this business didn’t smell right. “She one of yours?”

  “I am new to Olaire. You will have to ask High Priest Artagina.”

  “I mean to. How come you know she was trying to jump between worlds?”

  “We are in my temple. Nothing takes place here without my knowledge.”

  “You sensed her open a portal?”

  “I sensed her spirit depart her body—as did the Kerralai. Why else do you think the demon left?”

  “Her spirit passed over to this other world, then, but not her body?”

  “So it seems.” The priestess placed a hand on Bright Eyes’s brow as if she were checking her temperature. Was that a whisper of magic Kempis detected? No, he must have been mistaken.

  A suspicion came to him. “Were you the one who neutralized the demon’s sorcery?”

  The masked woman ignored the question. “Your hunt for this woman is at an end, Watchman. You may leave her body with me.”

  Kempis squinted at her. “What do you want with it?”

  “I’m sure I’ll think of something.”

  The Abyss, she would. Knowing Hilaire, the quina would want to see Bright Eyes’s corpse for herself—Kempis’s word alone that the assassin was dead would not suffice. In any event, he hadn’t spent days chasing down his prize just to surrender it to a stranger. Perhaps he would have Bright Eyes stuffed and mounted in the Watchstation’s common room—

  “What’s going on here?” a man’s voice boomed.

  The high priest’s sermon had ended, Kempis realized, and a figure wearing a gold mask was now striding through the doorway to the courtyard. It felt to the septia like he was being run down by a lederel bull, so he drew his sword and pointed it at the priest’s stomach.

  The man drew up. “You dare threaten me in my Lord’s temple?”

  His Lord? So this was Artagina himself? “Keep your voice down,” Kempis said to him. He jabbed a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of Bright Eyes’s corpse. “You want to wake her?”

  “Wake who?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me, but you’ll have to wait your turn. I ain’t finished with your priestess yet.”

  “Priestess, what priestess? What are talking about, man?”

  Kempis glanced behind. Then blinked. The masked woman was gone, and with her the body of the assassin. He turned to Sniffer. “Where’d she go?”

  For a moment the Untarian couldn’t speak. “I was looking at you…”

  Cursing, Kempis scanned the room. There were only two doors: the one that Sniffer was guarding and the one the high priest had come through. And if the priestess had dragged Bright Eyes that way, Kempis would have seen her circling behind Artagina. That meant she had to have vanished herself using sorcery. But then why hadn’t he sensed anything? He looked back at the high priest, wondering if the man held the answers. Judging by the puzzlement in Artagina’s eyes, though, he was as much in the dark as Kempis.

  The septia heard someone enter the room behind him. He swung round, expecting to see the priestess, but instead he found Duffle standing in front of him.

  “Sir, Septia, sir!”

  Kempis scowled. “How did you find me?”

  “Followed the carnage.”

  At a safe distance, no doubt. “Well? Spit it out.”

  “Another assassination, sir, Septia, sir. One of the Storm Lords—Thane Tanner.”

  Kempis’s pulse kicked in his neck. “Impossible.”

  “Happened outside the Oaken Arena. Crossbow bolt through the right temple.” Duffle raised a finger to show where the missile had struck. “Messy—”

  “When?” Kempis cut in.

  “Half a bell ago, maybe.”

  Half a bell ago Bright Eyes had been in the Round. And while Kempis had lost sight of her during the pursuit to the temple, there was no way she could have sneaked down to the arena and killed someone in that time—especially not with a Kerralai on her tail. Which could only mean …

  Another Shroud-cursed assassin.

  Feeling nauseated, Kempis exchanged a glance with Sniffer.

  The Untarian grinned. “Hilaire’s gonna love this.”

  * * *

  From atop the Dragon Gate, Karmel looked down at the dragons in the Cappel Strait. At dawn a Natillian official had poured dragon blood into the sea on the Sabian side of the portcullis, and now the creatures were taking it in turns to try to smash their way through. Every strike of their armored heads set the battlements juddering and Karmel’s teeth rattling. From beyond the door to the control room she heard voices, but as yet no guards had emerged to relieve her and Veran. The eighth bell had sounded an age ago, and the sun seemed to have become stuck in its flight across the sky. What in the Chameleon’s name was keeping the fools? The priestess just wanted to get on with this.

  She fingered the damp collar of her shirt. Earlier she and Veran had stripped the corpses of the two Dianese guards, only to find the soldiers had pissed themselves, leaving t
heir uniforms stained not just with blood but also with urine and—in Perfume’s case—excrement. Karmel had used water from her flask to wash the worst of the stains from the woman’s shirt and trousers. Then, with the eastern skyline brightening, she’d been forced to don the still-wet uniform. With the heat of the day building, the marks on the trousers had soon faded, but there remained a blotch on her collar below her right ear. The priestess could only pray anyone seeing it mistook it for nothing more sinister than a sweat stain.

  Veran had grumbled all the time he’d cleaned the blood from Clemin’s shirt. Karmel had long since given up hope of receiving any praise from him for having silenced the guards, but then it wasn’t like she was Veran’s pupil that she needed his approval. The truth was, he couldn’t have dealt with the soldiers any better than she had. That was what really irked him. He’d taken out his frustrations on Karmel by trying to order her to clean the naked corpses in case the stink of them alerted whichever guards came to relieve them. As if she was going to stand for that! Instead she’d climbed down to the gate, and Veran had reluctantly lowered the unwashed bodies for her to lash to the portcullis in the recess. It was only a matter of time before someone spotted—or smelled—them, but with luck the two Chameleons would be safely inside the control room before they did.

  Karmel’s throat was burning. She had used the last of her water washing blood from the battlements, but more worrying was the size of the uniform she’d inherited from Perfume. The sleeves of the jacket ended a finger’s width short of Karmel’s hands, and while her boots concealed the shortness of her trousers, they also pinched her toes. She’d hoped to hide her sandals beneath her jacket and change into them in the control room. But Veran had feared someone might notice the shoes, and in the end they, along with the priestess’s pack and everything in it, had been cast into the sea. All Veran had allowed her to keep was her sword and her baldric of throwing knives, now concealed beneath the sash across her chest.

  The priest, too, had retained a baldric of knives, together with two battered armguards which he’d clipped round his lower arms beneath his shirt sleeves. He wore Clemin’s blade at his hip, but no swordsman worth his salt would enter combat with an unfamiliar weapon—meaning Veran intended to fight bare-handed when his knives ran out, using his armguards to parry his enemies’ attacks. It seemed Karmel finally had an explanation for the abundance of scars on his arms, if not for how the man had managed to stay alive so long in the Chameleon’s service.