Guile of Dragons, A

by James Enge

  “Our power can, however, in some measure descend to yourself,” said the black Presence on the white throne. (Zahkaar? Or Torlan?) “Only that power, believe in it or not, can give you victory over your enemies in the Wardlands.”

  “Your enemies,” he replied absently, pondering the spell that bound him. It emanated from a place between the two thrones, shifting back and forth as the Powers exerted their tension on each other. His Sight could trace the spells’ invisible patterns in the stale air. His staff was with him, and his crystalline focus was bound up in a corner of his cloak. He could break the spell. But he waited. The two voices spoke on, in careful inimical alternation.

  “We require your consent,” asserted one, and paused.

  “To consent, you will require proof,” said the other.

  He found himself able to rise. He did so more slowly than was necessary, leaning heavily on his staff. When he had risen he put his hand under his cloak, as if to press against his heart. He wheezed loudly. His fingers closed on the cold smooth surface of his focus.

  “Go back as you came. Go back.”

  “Go back.”

  He turned and went slowly—not exactly as he had come, but in the manner of an old beaten man. He went from the place of pillars on the high dark island in the glowing mist. He went down the white-and-black, black-and-white stone stairway to the edge of the mist. The Two Powers stayed where they were (if that was where they were), but their voices followed him.

  “The two greatest masters of the Blackthorn Range. Saijok Mahr—”

  “—and Vild Kharum. They were extending hegemonies . . .”

  “It was natural law, the conflict of our wills. The guiles would unite.”

  “The function of this development was clear.”

  “They would move to settle their ancient grudge against the Seven Clans under Thrymhaiam—since passed under the Guard.”

  “This suited our opposing purposes.”

  “It was not even necessary for us to summon them.”

  “They had already sought us out.”

  He descended toward the mist, which opened like a tunnel before him.

  “Imagine, Ambrosius, the powers that can be yours—”

  “Remember, also, the vengeance your pride requires—”

  (The memories were becoming painful. Morlock, lying in the wrecked house, wondered dimly why he had not told them he was not an Ambrosius, had never been an Ambrosius.)

  He walked down into the dark hole in the mist and passed along the tunnel beyond.

  “The kingship will finally be yours.”

  “And not only of one land.”

  “You need not fear us.”

  “We need no kingship.”

  “Yet natural law, the conflict of our wills, informs us—”

  “The growing influence of the Two Powers in Kaen threatens the Wardlands.”

  “The Guardians are already grown curious; soon they will act. . . .”

  The mist grew red, before and above him. Still he walked on until the mist rolled back like a curtain, revealing two dragons drifting in midair above him. One was greenish black. The other was a red, and he recognized this one instantly.

  “Vild Kharum,” he muttered. Long ago, when he was still only a vocate, the people of Aflraun had offered him a tithe of all they possessed to fend off an attack by Vild and his ruin. He had done it, too—and, like a fool, refused the money. A capable maker could make his own money, of course, but he later learned how much people valued what they had to pay for—and how little they valued anything else.

  “How are the spoils of Aflraun, Vild?” he called out mockingly in greeting.

  The dragon roared. He did not move to avoid the flames but stood, bracing himself with his staff. His bravado was wasted, though; the flames never reached him. They turned back and engulfed Vild.

  Soon he realized why. Both dragons were surrounded by a net of fine fiery lines. The net narrowed in its middle, as if it had been twisted to make separate chambers for the two dragons. But the situation was more complicated than that. He traced one line from Vild’s end across the narrow separation to the stranger dragon’s side. He saw that it looped back to join itself, forming a continuous double loop—the symbol for eternity or infinity in many cultures, especially those under the sway of the Two Powers. He wondered how many lines there were, and tried to count a cross-section. He found he could not. Between every two lines there was another; another, too, between that one and either of the adjacent lines. . . . An infinite series of parallel lines. But if he stood back and looked at the whole he found the dragons clearly visible, as they should not have been.

  The two dragons reacted differently to their imprisonment. Vild was roaring again, trying to break through the fiery lines with fire. The lines about him were vivid and distinct. The stranger dragon was doing otherwise; he waited, almost quiescent, smoke trailing from his distended nostrils. Around him the lines were dim, almost invisible. It suggested the stranger dragon was more subtle, and therefore more dangerous, than the red-gold rival master.

  Perhaps the green-black dragon had simply realized what he himself had known almost instantly: those mind-bending lines of fire were merely an illusion. The real containment spell came from elsewhere, a variation of the one that had held him earlier. It proceeded from the same source: the shifting point of balance between the thrones of the Two Powers. Still holding his focus, he could trace the web of force back through the misty firelit air.

  The voices were speaking again in his ear, but he didn’t listen to them. He was weighing in his mind the consequences of cancelling the spell and releasing the dragons. And, since he was who he was—(the memories became painful here; Morlock put his hands over his face)—Ambrosius, the pause was a brief one. He put his thumb, second finger, and forefinger around the focus and let an image form in his mind. The image formed also in the focus. A lesser maker would have had to see the focus to know that the image was forming: to concentrate on the details, execute the lines. But he was who he was. The image formed; he knew it; that knowledge was simply a recognition of his own strength.

  When the image had fully formed in the crystalline focus, he exerted his will through the focus and the image appeared in the mist above. It was an image of the two dragons, coiled and writhing in midair, mirror-perfect reflections of Vild Kharum and Saijok Mahr.

  The mechanism of the spell perceived its objects and wrapped itself around the images, leaving the real dragons free. For a moment he wished he had Gryregaest in his hands again: this would have been a battle to equal that night on Tunglskin!

  Vild fell on him, breathing fire. The voices behind him called out, “Merlin, you are twice a traitor—”

  The memories became too tormenting to bear. Morlock shook free of them, shouting that it was a lie: he was no Ambrosius, no traitor, no Merlin. It was only when the echoes of his own voice returned to him, as he lay in the ruined house, that he realized he’d been a fool. Soon afterward, he heard the speech of dragons.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Maijarra

  One day it occurred to Deor that Morlock was dead. The thought came to him suddenly. It was too quick to be painful. He was polishing one of his gems. It was new work . . . and poor stuff. But better than he had grown before. He remembered that Morlock promised to help him with his gems, but never had the chance. Ah, well, he thought, the promise is at peace. The phrase was a ritual formula, referring to unkept obligations of the dead.

  It surprised him a little that the idea did not surprise him. Yes, Morlock was almost certainly dead. The thought had a dense black finality to it, but no pain, not yet.

  He finished polishing the stone and looked at it. Yes, it was bad. The color was not what he had wanted, and light passed through it milkily. He fell to thinking of the gems Morlock had grown: how fine they were, how large and full of light. Morlock had been incredibly gifted at that kind of making. Clever at it. It was a game. Once he had grown a gem with Deor’
s name in it, written in runic letters. It hadn’t looked well—they both admitted that—but who else could have done it at all? Then there was that night he had blown up the work chambers, making the freakish flawed gem that Tyr still wore as a pendant. Deor laughed about that whenever he thought of it, and he laughed a little now.

  There was some pain, now, though. Once Morlock, before he had reached his full growth, had burst into Deor’s workroom. “I need air!” he shouted. Deor dropped his tools and, an hour or so later, found himself following Morlock out of the unglazed window in the Eldest’s audience chamber. They crossed the ice lake atop Thrymhaiam, went through the Firehills and on to the Broken Coast, where the Whitethorns ran into the northern ocean.

  They didn’t return for more than a year, because Eldest Tyr sent a message after them, commanding them to work at the trading house the clans had set up on the Broken Coast, to deal with the ships that came north from Westhold. Perhaps it was a kind of punishment, an exile, and perhaps it was something else. Perhaps the Eldest had already realized what Deor and Morlock himself learned more slowly: that Morlock would never be at peace under Thrymhaiam.

  Now it would never be like that again. No one would ever stand outside his door at midnight shouting, “Air! Air!” It would never be the same. Or rather: it would always be the same now. Morlock had been a brief flash of light in Thrymhaiam’s caverns. Inevitably he had flickered and gone out.

  “I need air,” muttered Deor, in a kind of rebellion. But it wasn’t true. The greatest part of him was content, even in grief, in the niche that the countless ages of Thrymhaiam’s history had provided him. For a time, though, he had shared the senseless painful freedom of one who did not know his place, who did not belong. He could not forget it.

  He wondered how Morlock had died. Suddenly he could no longer sit still. He got to his feet and moved restlessly about the room. Then something occurred to him. It was a bizarre thought, against the rules, and none of his business anyway. So he decided to do it. He would do it for Morlock.

  He left his workshop and went to the Healing Chambers. There he met strange Vyrlaeth with his lizardlike smile, and they had a brief discussion. Deor left with a small tightly wrapped packet of maijarra leaves. Deor returned to his rooms and made a triply powerful infusion of the stuff, as if it were tea. Then he poured it into an empty bottle and plugged it with wax. He carried this with him as he returned to the Healing Chambers.

  Seven full days after the first assault on Thrymhaiam there was only one dwarf still subject to dragonspell. This was Vendas. He lay in a separate chamber, a guard with him at all times. Deor went to the chamber and entered it.

  The sick dwarf lay on a bed with no coverings. He was fully clothed, except for his boots, which stood beside the bed. The guard was sitting glumly on a stool against the far wall. The set of his shoulders was patient, but his hands were restless. He looked up without hope as Deor entered.

  “Go home, Orn,” said Deor.

  Orn leapt to his feet, then hesitated. “You mean it?” he asked. “I was to stay all night.”

  “I mean it. My family has gone to the Deep Shelters, and I don’t seem to sleep the same without them. ”

  Orn nodded. It was a common complaint. “I would stay . . . except I left something unfinished at my bench. I would have brought it with me, but they told me not.”

  “You know what I usually do? Bring wax tablets and a stylus. That way you can at least sketch out what you’re working on. It helps.”

  “Ach. I can’t work that way. I never know what I’m going to do until I heft the stuff with my hands.”

  “Well.”

  “Besides, you don’t have any tablets with you. I’ll wait until you get some.”

  “Never mind. I’ve got this.” Deor showed him the bottle. Dwarves are beer-drinkers, as a rule, but Deor was known to have picked up southern habits.

  Orn laughed and said, “Well, I’ll leave Ven to you. Pour some of that Southhold wine down his throat and see what he does.”

  “I just might do that,” Deor said. “How has he been?”

  “Just nothing. For seven days nothing. He’ll die soon, of thirst if nothing else.”

  It would be ironic if someone dying slowly of thirst were to suddenly drown. That was Deor’s chief concern about his plan. He bid Orn good night and sat down on the stool.

  When the sound of Orn’s footfalls had died away in the corridor outside, Deor stood and went to the bed where Ven lay.

  As he unstoppered the bottle he wondered what he ought to do. He supposed he should pull back Ven’s lips and hold his nose, pouring the liquid between his teeth. The problem was that this would almost certainly result in him breathing it in. He had come to cure Ven, not kill him.

  The thought re-formed itself in his mind, and at last he knew his own intent. He had indeed come to cure Ven—or kill him. Ven was the only, albeit unwilling, agent of the dragons under Thrymhaiam. Reclaiming him, or killing him if it happened that way, would be an act of revenge, the first act of a revenge that would become famous.

  True, Ven was essentially innocent. But it was part of the ethic of revenge to make the innocent suffer. This was something Morlock had never understood. The logic of revenge requires an insane and unbearable punishment for the most sane and thinkable offense. It makes the next offense less thinkable and besides . . . it was simply necessary.

  Ven’s eyes opened. It was shocking, not only because he had been unconscious for seven days, but because of the eyes themselves. They were red. The “blacks” fairly glowed a deep fiery red, dimly coloring the once-gray irises. Even the whites were bright and bloodshot.

  “You,” Ven croaked.

  Deor wondered what had caused him to finally stir. Perhaps only now had he realized he was not alone. Perhaps he had suddenly given up resisting the dragonspell. Perhaps he had been told to wait just this long before awaking. It didn’t matter.

  “You,” Ven croaked. “You will be the first. I bring a song without words. I bring the Consolation of the Two Powers—”

  Deor deftly put the neck of the bottle between Ven’s teeth and held his patient’s nose. The subsequent gargling explosion was indeed a song without words.

  Left leg. Left leg. The left leg: you will have it . . .

  Not as it was. Not. Where is Vild now? This is no victory—

  You are a tonguer and a Softclaw. I sold you the left leg for twenty.

  Morlock lay in the ruined house, listening to two dragons track him down. They had heard his cry and were coming for him. They were searching already, apparently, even before his involuntary shouts. A trophy of the Guardian whom the master was unable to spellbind would be a valuable and sought-after possession in the guile, or so Morlock gathered from eavesdropping on the dragons. Vild had been forced to three challenges in succession after Morlock’s embassy.

  Like old Ambrosius in Aflraun, said one. This stray comment struck Morlock like a fist. For a moment the gathering strength of his sanity vanished in a flood of anxiety and self-hatred.

  Yet Vild is still crowing like a rooster on a dung heap, the other dragon grumbled in reply.

  The two fell silent for a moment. Morlock found that he could indeed hear a dragon roaring repeatedly in triumph. That could mean only one thing: Vild had won his duels and killed each one of his self-styled rivals in combat. The fact hung in Morlock’s awareness for a moment without carrying any weight. Then he realized: those dragons had rebelled because of his words. They were three dragons who would fly no more to Thrymhaiam to plunder and kill his harven kin. How many more might be drawn down the same path?

  Then Morlock knew he had found a weapon to destroy the guile. Crazed or not, his mind held the secret of victory against the invaders. He must return to Thrymhaiam, so that wiser minds could put his knowledge to use.

  He listened to the two dragons (apparently there were only two) approach from the north to the sound of crushing and splintering wood. (There must be other buildings ne
arby, then. Perhaps the house had been part of an outlying farm.) Their search went slowly. Morlock guessed that, like most serpents, they heard poorly. Their fiery venom-laden breath would also prevent them from having much of a sense of smell. But Morlock did not doubt they must have unusually clear eyesight, in day or night. That was what he must guard himself against.

  Keeping his own ears attentive, he rolled over and crept on his hands and knees past blackened and fallen timbers to the collapsed doorway of the building. Cautiously he peered out.

  Beyond the broken doorway he saw the hundred fires of the guile of dragons, with Vild Kharum above them on the hoard nestled into the side of a mountain. The master dragon was still roaring in triumph. Morlock could see several smoking heaps before the hoard, from which the light was fading. The scene was perhaps five hundred paces distant to the southwest.

  Morlock pulled back until they were out of sight. He was confused. He had clearly heard the two dragons approaching from the north. Regardless of that he himself was north and somewhat east of the ruin. This was bad. He had hoped to make his way through the ruins of Haukrull town to the Pilgrim’s Gate of the Runhaiar, and from there go to Thrymhaiam easily enough. Now that was obviously impossible; he could not hope to creep past the guile without any of its members noticing him. He would have to head north and try crossing the Haukr range overland, by way of the Thains’ Northtower.

  He looked out again. He didn’t think he would have survived if he were thrown this far by Vild’s fiery blast; the fall would have killed him. Probably he had fallen some distance away and crawled instinctively toward cover. It was strange that he didn’t remember, while he did “remember” things that surely never happened to him. Yet between fire, blows to the head, and poison he was lucky not to be worse off than he was.

  But it was insane to put it like that, with a hundred dragons between him and safety. He could go the other way, over the mountains . . . except that his clothes were singed rags, he had no food, and there were two dragons between him and the mountains, waiting for him to raise his head.