Split Heirs

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  “Then what should we do now?”

  “We should, first of all, find out just what in the nineteen variegated hells of the forbidden gods of Dhum is going on around here.”

  “And how do we do that, Your Highness?”

  The Black Weasel, brave and dashing leader of the Bold Bush-dwellers, sighed mightily. “We pick Dunwin up and go to the feast, I suppose,” he said.

  The Purple Possum suddenly found something utterly fascinating on a nearby balcony, to judge by the intensity with which he stared at it as he said, “Need we bring Dunwin? While the lad certainly has his virtues, he has peculiarities, as well. For example, he’s prone to fixations, such as his obsession with his lost Bernice. If this dragon truly is his Bernice, I fear his behavior might be completely uncontrollable, which might be inconvenient.”

  The Black Weasel looked down at the prone figure before them. “You have a point,” he said. “Come on, then.”

  Together, the two men marched up the street, following the banners, leaving Dunwin where he lay.

  They were out of sight for less than a minute before Dunwin rose to his feet and shook his head to clear it. Discovering he was alone, he looked about in confusion, spotted the banners, and remembered.

  “Bernice!” he said.

  He didn’t know where the Black Weasel and the Purple Possum had gone, and he didn’t much care; he wanted Bernice. He started up the street.

  Meanwhile, in the great square, the crowd was becoming bored; although at first it had seemed as if most of the population of the city was standing along the side of the plaza in eager anticipation, many had drifted away during the long wait, and those who remained had settled to the cobbles. Some now sat on blankets or cushions brought from home, while others made do with bare pavement.

  Bernice, for her part, was very irritable indeed. She had been sitting there for over an hour, listening to Arbol produce a truly astonishing string of vituperation. Voices from the audience were beginning to be heard, as well.

  “Go ahead and eat her!”

  “Get it over with, charcoal breath!”

  Bernice paid little attention; she had become fascinated, despite her anger, with Arbol’s ability to spew out insult after insult without repeating. She had never heard anything like it.

  The Blue Badger sat unhappily by the dragon’s foreclaw, trying to figure out what had gone wrong.

  “He left before us,” he said for the fifty-seventh time. “He must have reached the city before us. He must be in hiding somewhere close by. He must know what’s going on here!”

  “Unless he got lost,” the Puce Mongoose said, for the thirty-third time. “Or something else went wrong.”

  “Why don’t we just let Bernice eat her?” Wennedel asked. “Then the Gorgorian royal family would be gone and they’d have to crown a Hydrangean!”

  “But we want ’em to crown the Black Weasel,” the Badger pointed out, “not some silly third cousin of old Fumitory or something.” He hesitated, then added, “Besides, I don’t understand all this stuff very well, and I don’t want to do anything until the Weasel gets here and says it’s okay.”

  “But what if he doesn’t show up? If he doesn’t get here soon, Bernice is going to…well…”

  “I know that!” the Blue Badger shouted. “And he’ll be here! He left before us, he must have reached the city…”

  The argument rolled on.

  Across the square, another argument was continuing, as well.

  “I say we slay the dragon and free him…I mean, her,” Pentstemon said.

  “Why?” a Gorgorian soldier asked.

  “Because she’s the rightful king!”

  “She’s a girl—saw it myself.”

  “Well, she can’t help that!” Pentstemon said, waving an arm about wildly. “I’m one of the Prince’s Companions, and that means I’m supposed to defend the prince, not stand here while they feed him to…I mean, feed her to a dragon!”

  “Not a prince, if it’s a her,” someone pointed out.

  “But she used to be!”

  “How’d we slay the dragon, always supposin’ we wanted to, which I am not sure of?” a soldier asked.

  “Hack its head off!” Pentstemon shouted.

  The soldier shrugged. “You’ve got a sword,” he said. “Go right ahead.”

  Pentstemon glared, and did not draw his blade. A thought struck him.

  “Arrows!” he said. “We could put its eyes out with arrows, then…”

  “Then it’d thrash about and mash half the city to kindling,” a grizzled old Gorgorian pointed out. “My great-grandda tried something like that with a swamp dragon, or at least that’s what he claimed, but he had a cliff nearby for it to fall over, which we don’t happen to have here in the middle of the city, so far as I can make out.”

  Pentstemon glared about, and had to admit that there was no cliff in the middle of the square. He also noticed that the dragon’s wings looked quite functional, and suspected a cliff wouldn’t be very effective in any case.

  And at that moment, the Black Weasel and the Purple Possum emerged from the street into the square, a few yards behind the dragon, where the Puce Mongoose immediately spotted them.

  “Look!” he shouted. “It’s the Black Weasel!”

  Arbol shrieked an obscenity; Bernice cocked her head thoughtfully, repeating Arbol’s phrase to herself. Then she nodded.

  “Got one,” she said. “About twenty minutes ago. I knew she couldn’t keep it up forever!”

  Then the Mongoose’s shout registered, and she swung her head around to look at the two rather bedraggled new arrivals.

  “Is that him?” she asked.

  “Well, yes,” the Blue Badger admitted. “That’s the Black Weasel. Now, just wait a minute, and I’m sure he’ll tell us what we should do…”

  “Wait?” Bernice snorted, and the Blue Badger felt his hair singe. “Wait? I’ve been waiting for an hour, listening to that filthy little bitch insult me, and now she’s finally started repeating herself, so there’s nothing more to learn, and your Black Weasel’s here, and you said, you said that when the Weasel got here I could eat her.”

  Bernice got to her feet.

  “You said wait for the Weasel; well, there he is, so now I’m going to eat that nasty little thing.”

  In no particular hurry, she started across the square.

  Dunwin was almost running by the time he reached the square; he charged past the Black Weasel and the Purple Possum without even noticing them, past the other Bold Bush-dwellers as they called uselessly after Bernice.

  He had eyes only for her. At last, at long last, he had found her.

  “Bernice!” he called.

  No one heard him over the racket the Bold Bush-dwellers were making. He charged on into the square, which had begun to fill with Gorgorian soldiers and other citizens, all rushing about trying to do something useful with no idea at all what that might be.

  A bowstring twanged; Pentstemon had finally convinced someone. An arrow tore through the air mere inches from Bernice’s face, and she stopped, startled, in her advance on the platform in the center of the square.

  Arbol spat at her, and Bernice growled. She took another step, and three more arrows flew; one missed cleanly, the other two ricocheted off hard green scales.

  “No!” Dunwin screamed, running forward and almost stumbling as he struggled to draw his sword without slowing. “No, don’t hurt her! Wait, I’ll save you!”

  A sudden hush fell, as everyone—soldiers, civilians, and Bush-dwellers—watched Dunwin charging toward the dragon.

  “He’s going to save the princess!” someone shouted.

  “He’ll slay the dragon!” someone else called back.

  “Make way! Make way for the dragon-slayer!” The cry went up from several throats.

  Bernice paid no attention; alone of everyone present, she had not yet noticed Dunwin. She was concerned only with her potential dinner and the annoying little arrows that whiz
zed about her. She reared up before the platform and looked down at Arbol.

  The princess continued to shout invective, and Bernice smiled at the thought of silencing that foul mouth once and for all.

  And just then, another figure leaped up on the platform, sword in hand. Uncomfortably aware of the traditions of dragon-slaying, thanks to the Blue Badger’s warnings, Bernice turned her attention from Arbol to this intruder. She lowered her head for a better look, and to get within flaming range, ready to yank her head back the instant that sword came too close.

  “Bernice!” Dunwin shrieked. “It’s me!”

  Bernice blinked; her jaw dropped in astonishment, and she ducked down for a closer look.

  “It’s getting ready to breathe fire!” someone shrieked from the crowd.

  Dunwin, seeing Bernice’s face approaching, dropped his sword and flung both his arms around her neck in an eager bear hug.

  “Oh, Bernice,” he said into her ear, “it’s so good to see you!”

  “By all the gods!” someone called. “He’s trying to strangle it with his bare hands!”

  “Who is that?” asked another voice.

  “What a hero!”

  “What an idiot!”

  “What’s the difference?”

  And as all the city watched, Bernice the dragon raised her head upward, Dunwin still clinging to her neck, his feet waving about in empty air.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Wulfrith didn’t like to be disrespectful or anything, and he knew that he should treat his master with all possible courtesy and deference, but really, he thought it was a little inconsiderate of Clootie to have passed out before he was even out the door of his cell.

  The old wizard had let out a tremendous gasp of relief when his gag was removed, had moaned as his bonds were cut away and discarded, and had then fainted dead away, and Wulfrith had been utterly unable to rouse him.

  At last, the lad had hoisted Clootie up onto his shoulders, and had carried him out of the cell and through the dungeon corridors, heading for the exit.

  At least, he thought he was heading for the exit. After awhile, he began to realize that he didn’t really know where he was going. He had not bothered to ask the screamer for directions for leaving the dungeons, nor had he noticed just where he entered in the first place.

  What’s more, after he had wandered through the tunnels for awhile, Wulfrith began to tire. Disgraceful as it was to concern himself with anything so mundane, he wished Clootie had lost those few pounds he always said he wanted to lose.

  Still, he staggered on. What choice did he have? There was no one around he could ask for directions; he hadn’t even seen a guard since he freed Clootie, but only endless gloomy gray corridors, lit here by a flickering torch, there by a trace of sunlight filtering in from somewhere overhead, and over there by nothing at all. Cobwebs adorned the walls and ceilings, and in time, they adorned Wulfrith’s hair and hands as well, and covered Clootie in a thin grey lacework. Dust lay thick on the floor. Water and other liquids dripped and oozed here and there, keeping the flooring treacherously slippery.

  It seemed as if he wandered for hours; after a time, he no longer seemed to see any cells, but just endless blank-walled corridors. If the passages had not remained so uniformly dank and unpleasant, Wulfrith might have thought he had left the dungeons behind.

  And in truth, he thought maybe he had left the dungeons behind, but he still had no idea where he was. He forged on.

  Eventually, he came up against a large, locked door that barred the corridor he was in. He stared at it for a moment. A few times, he had found himself in dead ends where he had had to turn around and retrace his steps. He really hoped that this was not another—but those had ended in walls, not doors.

  And although he couldn’t be sure, since a reasonable amount of daylight seeped into this particular corridor through a small overhead grille, but he thought he could see light coming under the door.

  That was not something he had seen before. He thought that just perhaps he had, at last, found a way out.

  The door was locked, of course, but that wouldn’t stop him. As he had demonstrated to Arbol once or twice, he had a spell that could handle most locks, a very simple little one that he’d learned years ago. Clootie called it the Efficacious Ceremony of Multipartite Unbinding and Revelation; Wulfrith thought of it as the opening spell.

  It was so simple he didn’t even need to put Clootie down to work it. He made the requisite gesture one-handed, and managed to speak the incantation without grunting.

  The door creaked open, and blindingly bright sunlight poured in; adjusting his master’s weight, Wulfrith stepped forward, blinking.

  He had assumed that he would emerge from the passages into the palace cellars, or perhaps a corridor or guardroom somewhere; it appeared that that wasn’t the case at all. He was in a narrow little courtyard somewhere, walled on all sides but open to the sky, and with a narrow door at the far end. He could hear voices and noises, not so very far away—the sounds of the city, he thought.

  He looked around, and realized that he couldn’t see the palace over any of the walls; he guessed that just like in the old stories, he had found a secret escape tunnel from the palace, one that came up somewhere else in the city.

  For a moment he wondered why none of the Old Hydrangean nobility had used the tunnel on that day fifteen years before when the Gorgorians came into the city, raping and pillaging and slaying. Why hadn’t old King Fumitory fled into exile through it?

  Then he realized that in all probability, the old king hadn’t been able to find the escape tunnel. It wasn’t exactly well-marked or easy to travel. Just like the Hydrangeans to make things hard on themselves, he thought.

  He stepped out into the courtyard and started for the small door.

  As he walked, he realized that the sounds he was hearing were probably not the sounds of the city going about its everyday business; at least, he had never before noticed that the city’s everyday business involved that much screaming and shouting. Something was clearly going on. He quickened his pace.

  The narrow door was locked; annoyed, he worked the opening spell again, and stepped quickly through, without looking to see what lay beyond.

  He found himself in a great square, where people were seething in various directions, yelling at each other. In the center of the square was a platform, and on the platform stood a post, and chained to the post…

  “Arbol!” the lad shouted. “Is that you?”

  Arbol paid no attention, probably didn’t even hear him over all the other noise and confusion, and Wulfrith suddenly realized what Arbol was staring at. At first he had taken it for some sort of green backdrop; now he looked up, and saw that it was a dragon, a dragon with someone clinging to its throat, clearly in a hopeless life-or-death struggle with the monster.

  And Arbol was quite obviously there to serve as dragonbait.

  She was not, however, taking naturally to the role. “Cut me free, somebody, and I’ll kill it!” she shrieked; Wulfrith noticed for the first time, despite the incredibly inappropriate timing, that Arbol’s voice had never really changed. Maybe she really had been a girl all along.

  He lurched forward, Clootie’s limp hands thumping against his ribs, taking in more details.

  The dragon was making noises, almost as if it were talking—did dragons talk? And the lad clutching its neck was saying something, as well; Wulfrith couldn’t make out a word of it.

  There were Gorgorian soldiers over there, arguing about something.

  There was another group of people behind the dragon, dressed in silly costumes with green tights and brown tunics and funny hats—or sometimes brown tights and green tunics, and one of them was all in black, but they all had funny hats. They were arguing too.

  There was a group of Gorgorian women, with Lady Ubri at their head, marching up one of the streets into the square.

  Queen Artemisia was off to one side, being restrained by Phrenk and Mu
ngli and some other people Wulfrith didn’t recognize.

  Just about the entire population of the city, in fact, seemed to be gathered in the square, watching this young stranger battle the dragon.

  There was a sword lying on the platform; the warrior who was trying to strangle the dragon must have dropped it, Wulfrith decided. He looked up, decided there was no way to get the weapon back up to the young man.

  Whoever he was, Wulfrith thought, he was very brave.

  “Get me out of these stupid things!” Arbol shouted.

  Wulfrith frowned, and worked the opening spell. The iron shackles sprang open.

  In an instant, Arbol had dived to the platform and come up with the sword. She stood, feet braced apart, and swung the blade over her head.

  “Yo, dragon!” she shouted, puffing out her chest. “Put that idiot down and deal with me!”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  “Arbol, you put that sword down this instant!” Queen Artemisia yelled. She broke free of Phrenk and Mungli, but was intercepted by Lord Bulmuk, who had been instructed to keep an eye (and both hands) on the queen until the sacrifice could be accomplished. Angry and frustrated, Artemisia thrashed and kicked, but it was no use. She had to be satisfied with calling out imperiously to her daughter, “That’s no way for a lady to behave!”

  “In a minute, Mother,” the princess hollered back, never taking her eyes off the dragon. “Just as soon as I kill this ugly beast.”

  Still clinging to Bernice’s neck, Dunwin couldn’t help but overhear. “Does she mean me?” he asked his long-lost companion.

  “Don’t be an idiot,” Bernice replied, taking a few steps backward. “She means me, and the little bitch is right: I am ugly.”

  “You’ll always be beautiful to me, Bernice,” Dunwin said fondly, stroking her scales. “It is kind of weird without all that wool, though.”

  “Tell me about it.” Bernice sidestepped as Arbol took a swing at her. “But life’s full of little changes. You get used to ’em.”