Eastward Dragons

by Andrew Linke

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Other Books

  Dedication

  Blank Page

  Episode I

  Closing

  EASTWARD DRAGONS

  Andrew Linke

  Copyright © 2015 Andrew Linke

  All rights reserved.

  Connect with Andrew Linke online:

  www.alinke.com

  twitter.com/darkillumine

  Andrew Linke on Google+

  If you enjoy this book, please share it with someone you know, whether by handing the printed copy to someone, sharing quotes online, or giving a copy of the ebook to a friend. Just make sure everyone knows who wrote it.

  Please leave a review on GoodReads or Amazon. It really helps.

  Works by Andrew Linke

  Oliver Lucas Adventures

  The Staff of Moses

  The Eye of Odin

  The Diamond of Souls

  Words of Binding (September 2015)

  Speculative Fiction

  Burning in the Void

  Eastward Dragons (ongoing serial novel)

  Thank you to Rand & Robyn Miller for teaching me that words have the power to create worlds.

  And to J.R.R.T. for showing us all the way.

  EASTWARD DRAGONS

  Episode I

  Eastward to Dragons

  ⫛

  The band of runes tattooed around Neasa’s throat flickered with a faint red light. She reached up with curling fingers, desperately grasping at the invisible ropes that tightened around her neck like a hangman’s noose, but no matter how deeply her chipped fingernails dug into the flesh, she would never be able to break the bonds that now threatened to choke the life from her.

  “I ought to let you die,” Dolin growled. He bent low and spoke through gritted teeth. Flecks of spittle still clung to his short-cropped brown beard. “You know better than most the importance of discipline. Of following orders.”

  Neasa thrashed against the runic bonds. It was pointless to resist, she knew, but she would let the nightmares take her before she bowed to Dolin. She turned her head towards the foul old man, gritting her teeth as the invisible ropes tore at her flesh.

  Their eyes met.

  “I don’t care whose whore daughter you are. In this camp you are mine. I bear the command sigil. I give the orders. I…”

  Neasa spat in Dolin’s face.

  The runes gripped her more tightly. Neasa felt as if her head might be cut from her shoulders by the constricting noose. Her vision flashed red, then faded to black.

  She collapsed to the sands of the training field, legs twitching, mouth gasping for air that could not pass her strangled throat. Dolin swore and wiped at his face with the sleeve of his uniform, then looked around at the crowd of soldiers who had stopped their own training to watch. Many of them had been similarly punished at one time or another, especially those who had elected to join the frontier guard as an alternative to execution, but most had the sense to following commands at the first twinge from the restraint runes tattooed around their necks.

  “Get back to your exercises!” Dolin roared, raising the command sigil and glaring at each of the squad leaders in turn.

  Neasa spasmed, kicking up a cloud of dust as her body thrashed on the ground. At her neck, the flesh surrounding the rune band was streaked with red. Faint indentations were actually beginning to appear in her flesh as the runes pulled tighter.

  The soldiers returned to their exercises, hesitantly at first, then with renewed intensity. Not a one of them wanted to feel the wrath of the grizzled old commander.

  “What is the meaning of this?” a voice called out, cutting through the sound of men and women vigorously sparring with fists and weighted practice blades.

  Dolin turned his face up towards the wide stone balcony above the stronghold gate, where he saw Lord Cyvith leaning against the crenelation. “Instilling discipline in a soldier under my command, Sir!” he shouted. He jerked his head towards Neasa. “Veatro here refused to follow orders.”

  “It is difficult to follow orders when one is dead, Commander,” Lord Cyvith said. He glowered down at the scene unfolding on the training ground and shook his head. “Send the soldier to me.”

  “I can handle her, my…”

  “Are you refusing an order?” Lord Cyvith asked. He narrowed his hard blue eyes and pulled his lips into a scowl. The jagged white scar that cut across his burnished skin from the corner of his mouth up to his left ear gleamed as the late afternoon light fell upon it.

  Dolin swallowed hard, imagining for an instant the feeling of an invisible rope tightening around his own neck. His eyes fixed on the sigil pinned to Lord Cyvith’s uniform and he allowed himself a breath of relief, seeing that the commander made no move to touch the sigil. To Dolin’s knowledge, Lord Cyvith had never actually employed the rune bond to extract compliance from an officer, but he was certainly unwilling to become the first.

  He touched a finger to the command sigil pinned to his own uniform and whispered the release command.

  Neasa felt the cords around her neck dissolve into nothing as the runes ceased to glow and the invisible cords of force unwound themselves from around her neck. She let her hands drop to the sand and lay still, chest rising and falling in slow, agonizingly controlled breaths. The strangling sensation had been little more than an illusion, a manifestation of magical energy concentrated at her throat, but she still felt as if a thick hempen cord had been pulled around her neck.

  Control was what she lacked, she knew that, and yet it was control that she exercised now, forcing her body to capture every last wisp of life from the air she held within her before she breathed out slowly and took another slow, deep breath.

  “Stop lazing about and get your ass into the stronghold,” Dolin barked.

  Neasa took one last deep, slow breath and held it within her as she tensed the muscles of her legs, then her hips, belly, chest, arms, and finally fingers. She waited until her lungs began to ache for fresh air, then shoved off from the ground with her feet, curled her body, heaved with her shoulders, and tumbled upright to stand beside Dolin. The grizzled commander started and reached for his sigil again, but stopped and lowered his hand as Neasa strode away from him without a word.

  Dolin whipped about and began stalking down the rows of soldiers, searching for a new victim to bear the brunt of his wrath.

  Neasa strode to the door of the stronghold and waved at the guards stationed there to open the heavy door for her. This encounter might have been more painful than any before, but it was not the first time that she had been subjected to the humiliation of the rune bonds. It was, in fact, a common theme of her military career.

  The guards stationed at the door nodded in silent acknowledgement and one of them, a young lordly bastard named Pirth, who Neasa suspected was angling to find his way into her bed, hurried to push the postern gate open for her. She had no command authority here, the leadership of the New Tower had seen to that when they arranged a transfer to the western edge of the Commonwealth and stripped her of her commission, but that had done little to dampen her popularity with the soldiers of the outpost. If Dolin had intended to break Neasa by repeatedly humiliating her from the day she arrived at Greenwatch Tower, he had certainly gone about it the wrong way.

  She slipped through the postern gate, laying a hand on Pirth’s breastplate as she passed and whispering a soft word of thanks, then turned to ascend the tight spiral staircase that led up to the overview balcony. She doubted that she would ever invite him into her bed, but when a man was willing to devote himself to her with so little effort, it was just as well to keep his hopes up. It was always easier to manipulate others than to beat the
m into compliance. Even the best of leaders acted by playing upon the desires of others so that they believed themselves acting of their own accord.

  If only Dolin could grasp that lesson, the men and women of Greenwatch Tower might not hate the crusty old fool, Neasa thought as she climbed the spiral steps to the balcony above the gate.

  ⫛

  Out on the observation balcony, Lord Cyvith glowered.

  He turned away from the field thirty feet below and looked once more at the parchment in his hand. The angular black lettering spelled out an order that at once pleased and frustrated him. Certainly, the woman Neasa was trouble, he could see the way in which she had reworked the cloth of the outpost’s morale in only the few months that she had been posted here. Dolin, never the most diplomatic of commanders to begin with, had become increasingly brutal in his dealings with the woman and, with each outburst, his already shaky grasp on the motley assortment of half-rate soldiers assigned to the outpost grew more perilous. Still, Cyvith hated to have such a talented soldier taken from him, especially considering her extraordinary abilities.

  “Lord Cyvith,” Neasa said, announcing her arrival at the top of the stairs leading to the balcony. She stood in the doorway of the staircase, her back straight, her chin forward, her brought brown training leathers scuffed and dirty from a morning spent sparring.

  Cyvith looked up from the parchment and nodded to Neasa. He waved to the small writing desk that he kept, tucked up against the stones of the building. A rough, but sturdy looking wooden stool was tucked up beneath the desk. “Would you like to sit?” he asked.

  Neasa shook her head, but approached the desk and stood beside it. “I can stand to speak with my Lord,” she said.

  “How proper of you. I shall sit then, and you may stand. When you are as old as I am, soldier, you may come to appreciate any opportunity to rest your feet.”

  “I doubt that I will live to be as old as you.”

  Cyvith chuckled, his battered old throat rasping out the sound like a rusty hinge turning, and kicked the stool out from beneath the desk. He dropped the parchment to the desktop and settled down on the stool, leaning his shoulders back against the stones of the stronghold. This late in the day they were warm from standing in the sun all morning and the heat of them soothed the old battle scars that laced Cyvith’s back and shoulders.

  “If you continue to antagonize men like Commander Dolin, that may well be true. What did you do to stoke his rage this time?”

  “I questioned the wisdom of sending my unit on patrol in the western canyons the day after we returned from the south lands.”

  “That was not your place, Neasa.”

  “It was a foolish order. The others are weary from the journey and three of the men were injured while routing out gythral infestation. It was wolves this time. Wolves of a sort.”

  “Still, you ought to have raised your objections with your unit lieutenant, not with his commander. You have no command authority in this post, Neasa Veatro.”

  “I know what is right, Lord. And I have held authority before. I know the difference between pushing men for a necessary purpose and just throwing away a good unit.”

  Cyvith sighed deeply and rested a gnarled hand atop the parchment on the table. He fixed Neasa with a sturdy gaze and said, “You will not be scouting the south lands.”

  Neasa felt her left eyebrow tug upwards in surprise, but remained composed otherwise. She had expected Lord Cyvith to be more subtle than his vile subordinate, but to order her to comply nonetheless. He believed in maintaining the dignity of military command structure, and supporting the orders of officers in front of soldiers under their command was exactly the sort of damnably dignified action that she would have expected from the old warlord.

  “I see the runes lighting, Veatro. Do not think for a moment that I am going to countermand Commander Dolin’s order. The rest of your unit will set out for the southern coast within the week, but you will not be going with them.”

  “Decide to rid yourself of me at last?” Neasa snapped. She bit down on her tongue, immediately regretting her impulsivity.

  Cyvith said nothing, only pushed the parchment towards her with a fingertip.

  Neasa lifted the parchment and scanned the lines of crisp text. She recognized the handwriting immediately as that of Yi-Solta, her brother’s private secretary. What in all the hells could have been important enough for Yi-Solta to write to her?

  “I’ll save you the courtly discourse, if you would rather not trudge through it,” Cyvith offered.

  “I already have,” Neasa replied. “I’m not an illiterate frontline grunt, Lord Cyvith. My father and brother may have never seen fit to legitimize my birth, but received the best education whelp money could buy until I purchased my commission.”

  “And yet it never taught you to keep your tongue still.”

  “There is not enough gold in the Commonwealth to buy that.”

  “The crux of the matter is that you will no longer serve under Commander Dolin. For that matter you will no longer be under my command. Once you report to Tal Albahi you will serve under the direct command of the Royal Council on some sort of secret mission that I have been deemed unworthy to know the details of. Were we to tell your former commander about the transfer, I have no doubt that he would presume that you are being transferred to cleaning your brother’s boots, but I hope you will do the me the honor of not assuming that I have the same prejudices.”

  “If my brother were in the habit of arranging plush appointments for me do you think I would be out here?” Neasa replied, lowering the parchment and fixing Lord Cyvith with a skeptical eye.

  “I don’t suppose you would, though wherever you might be assigned, I hope to the gods that you are not in command.”

  “Oh?”

  “You’re too young. Too brash. You lure in boys with your sex appeal and men with your combat expertise, you make them worship your charisma and innate talent, but you are not prepared for the difficult decisions of command.”

  Neasa opened her mouth to protest, but Cyvith held up a single hand and gave the slightest shake of his head. She closed her lips into a tight line, took in a deep breath through her nose, and waited silently.

  “Good. You are learning already.” Lord Cyvith rose from the seat with a swift ease that belied his age and haggard appearance and strode past Neasa to stand at the crenelation, looking down on the training ground below. Nearly four hundred soldiers drilled there, pushing themselves beneath the hot afternoon sun and the brutal tutelage of Dolin. Speaking loud enough to be heard without turning he said, “Go pack your belongings, Neasa Veatro. You leave for the capital in the morning.”

  ⫛

  Havil A’Mar watched critically as the portly dwarf took a pinch of brightflower pollen between his bronze fingers, raised it to his nose, and inhaled sharply, leaving his sentence unfinished. The dwarf’s face twitched as the astringent dust blasted upwards to fill his sinuses, then continued speaking as if there had been no interruption whatsoever. “…At a significant profit, should they be willing to trade with us. Economic reports from the eastern lands are, obviously, quite out of date, but given the development of our gemstone mines over the last hundred years I think it unlikely that they will have opened a significant source of emeralds.”

  Havil permitted the drone of his counterpart from the Precious Commodities Guild to fade into the background. It was not that he had no interest in the value of diamonds versus emeralds, or the incredible profits to be made if this venture proved successful, but there was more to a society than its productive output of gold and gems. There was, to name just one thing, the society’s collective taste for spices and liquors, especially those that held the potential for altering the mind. Here in the Commonwealth there were few restrictions on the sale of such substances, but it was said that in the traditional dwarven homelands to the north east, the stone halls from which Jarom and his kin had fled countless centuries before, the possession of so
me herbs and spices was punishable by death, while in the elven empires that thrived in the impenetrable jungles east of Brackwater Bay few of the citizenry bothered with substances that could alter their physical bodies, owing to the inherently malleable nature of their persons.

  “I said, do you agree?” wheezed the dwarf.

  “I must confess that I was preoccupied, Guild Barron,” Havil replied, returning lazily to the conversation.

  Jarom DyZhokar snorted, an unpleasant habit of those who regularly consumed snuff of all types, and nodded his broad, balding head so that his double chins bobbed within the folds of his silk scarves. “That is understandable, Lord A’Mar. I suppose that you must contend with all manner of variables when calculating the prospect of traveling with consumable trade goods. Which are most prone to spoilage. Ratios of weight to volume to profitability. The likelihood of a particular consumable that is of value throughout the commonwealth or in the western empires being more common across the high mountains that separate us from the forgotten east.”

  “I was actually considering the identity of our expedition leader,” Havil said, not wishing to engage his counterpart in an actuarial discussion. “I suppose that Lord Biho will claim that honor for himself.”

  Jarom nervously spun his snuffbox on the arm of the wide upholstered chair, upon which he crouched like a colorful frog. His head bobbed back and forth as he contemplated the question, doubtless running a long string of calculations through a mind that was nearly as prodigious as his girth. Just as Havil was beginning to enjoy the silence Jarom snorted again, cleared his throat, and said, “I am doubtful, Master A’Mar. The potential risks of the journey are nearly too numerous to calculate, as I had said when considering the potential profit and loss ratios of my own cargo. Myself, I would not even think to engage in such a dangerous venture were the finances not backed by the crown.”