The Dread Wyrm

by Miles Cameron

  Ser John lay in the roots of a great tree, his back against its old bole. They were just at the edge of the woods.

  The old bear was as tall as the troll, and just as heavy. He wore a great bag dense with red and black porcupine quillwork, and had an axe—a heavy soldier’s axe—from far-off Etrusca.

  He sat—very like a man—back curved in fatigue, legs splayed. A very cautious Jamie the Hoek brought the bear water.

  “I am called Flint,” the old bear said.

  Around them, in amongst the old maples at the edge of night, moved two dozen other bears. Even covered in mud—and they were caked in the stuff—they gave off the occasional gleam of gold.

  Ser John extended his good hand. “I’m Ser John Crayford,” he said. “The Captain of Albinkirk.”

  “You are the lord of the stinking houses,” the bear said.

  Ser John swallowed his pain. “I suppose. And you?”

  “I lead the Crooked Tree clan,” Flint said. “I have for fifty summers.”

  “You saved us,” Ser John said.

  “More than you know!” Flint nodded. “But in the winter, you and the Light that Shines came to the deep woods and saved me. And many of my people.” He looked away—again, a very human head movement, but Ser John could not read the thing’s face. “That was an army—going to raid all the way around your stinking houses.”

  Ser John bit his lip. When he could master the pain, he said, “Yes.”

  “The sorcerer is marching on Ticondaga with all his force,” the old bear said. “We have refused to submit. But most of my people hate men—all men—more than they hate the sorcerer. Or at least as much.”

  Another bear came and squatted by the old bear. Ser John had the sense that the second bear was much younger—lithe, almost thin from winter.

  “We awoke to find his spies in our dens. He had massacred a clan, merely to show that he could.” Flint seemed to be talking to himself.

  “How can I help?” Ser John asked.

  The old bear looked at him, its muzzle weaving side to side. “Let us pass west,” he said. “We have friends to the west.”

  “The Abbess?” asked the wounded knight.

  “Is the Light that Shines not one of her mates?” asked the old bear.

  Ser John groaned with a desire to laugh that conflicted with his obviously broken rib. Or ribs.

  “The Abbess is a nun. Nuns are women who do not take mates.” Ser John took a careful breath.

  “Yes—some bears are the same, loving only their own, she-bear with she-bear,” Flint said.

  Ser John nodded. “Yes—but no. They take no mate at all.”

  “I have heard of this,” said the old bear. “But assumed it was just one of those rumours of hate that young people concoct. You mean some humans choose not to mate at all? What do they do in spring? Hibernate?”

  Ser John took another careful breath. “You speak the tongue of the west very well, for a bear.”

  “Some of us meet with men,” the bear admitted. “At N’Pana, or even Ticondaga.” The bear growled. “We do not work with fire, but a steel axe is a fearsome thing indeed.”

  “Then—if there is trade, you must know something about us?” the man asked.

  The bear growled. “More than I’d like. Can you give us passage west? On the road, and safe from your people?”

  Ser John sank back onto the bole. “Where are you going?” he asked. “Will you tell me what you know of the sorcerer?”

  The bear got up on all fours. “I will tell you much. How badly hurt are you? Your outer shell is unbroken.”

  “I am hurt,” Ser John admitted.

  Jamie the Hoek came back out of the near darkness. “I thought you might like this,” he said, handing the bear a pot.

  The bear sat, much like a stuffed bear in a toy shop, legs again splayed. It put the pot between its paws and pulled off the top.

  “Wild honey?” it said in a tone of pure greed.

  Jamie, the perfect squire, smiled, and his teeth shone in the dark. “I thought you’d like that,” he said again.

  The bear lifted a sticky snout from an empty pot a little later, and growled.

  Ser John was losing his ability to remain awake, but he tried to be courteous. “Lord Wimarc can escort you,” he said. “We have an army on the road to Lissen Carak. Lord Wimarc will see you get safe passage. You may want to go through the woods though…”

  The bear licked its obvious teeth and nodded at Jamie the Hoek. “I may have to change my opinion of men,” it said.

  Liviapolis—Morgon Mortirmir

  Morgon Mortirmir had moved up in the world—far enough to be trusted with real research.

  Unfortunately, he’d only exchanged one set of irritable magisters for another.

  Still, life was better. He stroked his fashionable short beard, thinking of Tancreda Comnena, who still sometimes called him “plague.”

  Who was no longer planning to become a nun. They had an understanding, although her side of the understanding seemed mostly to have an unlimited licence to tease him.

  Then he realized with annoyance that he was rubbing his short, pointed beard with the ink-stained fingers of his writing hand.

  “Son of a bitch,” he swore. He was tempted to drama—to hurl something—but his left hand was resting on a recently recovered thousand-year-old manuscript from somewhere east of Rhum and his right hand held an artifactualy-charged ivory pen, and he could spare neither.

  He compromised by swearing. He was getting better at swearing. As long as he didn’t blaspheme, the Master Grammarian, who still directed his studies, turned a blind eye.

  He looked at the manuscript again. It was very old—probably far older than it appeared. On the surface, it was yet another re-hash of Aristotle. An astute Etruscan collector had noted some capitals—carefully illuminated—in an older hand, and had taken a magnifying glass to it.

  It had been scraped clean somewhere in the east, a thousand years ago. Long before the Wild’s hordes had swept across the Holy Land and destroyed every sign of man—back when Demetriopolis and Alexandria Fryggia were thriving cities and not horrifying necropoli where only the not-dead and the boldest or most desperate adventurer or scriptorium-collector dared go.

  Morgon was determined that someday, when his powers were fully developed, he would assay Demetriopolis and Ptolemaica himself. The library had once been the world’s greatest. The Suda, a collection of what appeared to be librarian’s notes on the collection, even claimed to have had manuscripts—scrolls—from other spheres. Other spheres! His thoughts went off into a whirlwind of supposition, creation and destruction like an intellectual ouroboros.

  But the reality of the manuscript under his elbow drew him back. Hidden under the ancient Aristotle was something far more wonderful. It was, in fact, an Archaic essay on farming. Embedded in it were six workings, none of which had been deciphered by the Grammarian. He’d handed the whole amazing relic to Morgon with the words “You’re a genius—see if you can do anything with this.”

  Morgon had spent every hour of the last forty on one passage three paragraphs long.

  He had every word of the Archaic deciphered.

  He had all the traditional grammatical parts of a working—the opening, which was sometimes an invocation and sometimes an enhancement of memory; the orologicum, a modern term for the process by which any one working accessed the power available from ops and potentia; and the trigger, which had a variety of elegant names in Low Archaic and usually a single High Archaic word.

  He had that.

  He knew the purpose of the working, as well. Flavius Silva’s Low Archaic was not on order with some of the other recently rediscovered ancients, but his words were easy enough to read, and Morgon had gone a step further by asking Tancreda to translate the whole passage, as she was a far better linguist than he.

  “For the remedy of bad water for stock. Being that too often the farmer must use what water there is, whether that water
be cool, flowing, and clean, or whether the farmer face a long summer and dry, and needeth to have his animals take even that which is green and full of filth.”

  Morgon could see it well enough.

  And the trigger was Purgo.

  So—a single word, usually very powerful. The underlying working was very complex. Complex, with a simple trigger—very powerful.

  Yesterday, far more awake, Morgon had worked it, with Tancreda standing by (and her brother, too—Morean noblewomen did not spend time alone with male students for any reason) on a glass of hideous, dirty water, green with some sort of an algae bloom that was particulate in nature.

  He mastered the working, powered it, and felt the ops inhabit the working and give it life.

  And then—nothing. The water in the glass remained a lurid green, like an advertisement for the enmity of the Wild to the works of man.

  He cast it three times, the third with Tancreda’s brother, an apprentice of the first year, barely able to summon a candle flame, measuring the working’s energy before and after ops.

  Stefanos shrugged. “You cast a great deal of ops,” he said.

  Morgon had shaken his head.

  Now, a day later, and so tired that he could barely write out his notes, he had an idea. The idea was foolish, but Tancreda told him he was a fool all the time.

  She was close behind him, insisting that he stop and take a meal.

  He shook his head. “In a moment,” he said. He lifted the lurid glass of slime—and drank it.

  Tancreda tried to dash it to the floor. “Oh, by the risen Christ, you will turn into something damned. At the least, you will never kiss me with that mouth again. Oh, my God. Stefanos, fetch a doctor—no, the Grammarian.”

  As if summoned, the Master Grammarian appeared at the door. “What has happened?” he demanded.

  Mortirmir shrugged. Were his guts churning? Did he imagine that?

  “He drank the water,” Stefanos said. “Sir,” he added a little too late.

  “Water?” the Master Grammarian asked, but he was not a master magister for nothing, and he picked up the clawed-foot glass and examined it. “Algae—a form of plant—did you know that?”

  “I thought it might be an animiculus,” Mortirmir said.

  “Why did you drink it?” demanded the Grammarian.

  “I learned the working. It is supposed to purify water. Power goes in—quite a lot of power. But the water does not appear to change.” Mortirmir shrugged.

  “You can purify water by boiling it,” the Grammarian noted.

  Morgon stopped looking at his hands and thought. He looked at the Grammarian. “In which case, the water is purified, but the solids—mud, particulate matter, animaliculae—remain.”

  The Grammarian nodded. “Yes.”

  “And so with this working, but there is no warmth. I drank the water to ascertain the effect—whether it was, in fact, purified.” He shook his head. “It certainly tastes like raw bile.”

  The Grammarian nodded. “Sensible, in an insane, over-tired way. Have me summoned if you fall sick.” He walked out through the door.

  Tancreda shook her head. “You will be sicker than all the sick dogs,” she began.

  Mortirmir shivered. But the process was on him—he ignored the lovely Despoina Comnena to pick up the magnifying glass he had used on the manuscript. Instead, he looked at the algae in the glass. Magnified, it was even more horrible.

  But his idea bore no fruit. He looked and looked, but there were no malevolent darting shapes living in the weed—or the corpses thereof, which might have justified the expenditure of ops.

  He was two hours into the creation of an enhancement working to create a lens of air when he realized that he knew nothing of lenses.

  Tancreda rolled her eyes. “I will go to the library again,” she said. “Why not just ask a glass grinder?”

  Morgon slapped his knee. “Brilliant!” he said, and was out the door with neither purse nor cloak.

  In the emptiness of his absence, Tancreda turned to her noble brother. “You see why I love him,” she said.

  He shrugged. “No. He’s quite mad.” He looked out into the street, where Morgon was running—long legs stretching as if in a sprint in the hippodrome.

  Tancreda pulled on a cloak, found her talisman for the library, and pulled on a hood and a mask. “No. He doesn’t always communicate well, but he’s not mad.”

  “Why the sudden fascination with lenses? We were reading Old Archaic, and then—zip! That’s all done.” Stefanos laughed. “Like a small child.”

  “He can be hard to follow,” Tancreda admitted. “But if I read him aright, he decided that the working does function, and that it is killing or removing or perhaps summoning something very small indeed. And now he needs to create the means to observe and prove his theory. Hence the lens.”

  Stefanos looked at her a moment. “You understood that from what—his grunting?”

  Tancreda shrugged. “Give me twenty ducats. Yes—and the way his hand moved on the passage, and the way he picked up the glass. Yes.”

  “You’re as mad as he,” her brother said. “And don’t imagine I don’t know you’ve kissed him, you wanton.”

  The last was said with less venom than might be imagined.

  “I still know where you keep your little Ifriquy’an,” Tancreda said with equanimity. “So we’ll have no holier than thou here.”

  “You can’t marry him,” her brother said. It was more a question than an answer. In fact, he whined it.

  “I can, and I will,” Tancreda said. “You’ll see.”

  Stefanos had been seeing his sister get her way on all things since he was born. He didn’t doubt her.

  “Family dinners…” he moaned.

  But the door slammed, and she was gone, leaving the young man alone with a fabulously ancient manuscript, a cat, and a glass of algae.

  He patted the cat.

  Two hundred leagues further west, an old man made a solitary camp where the mighty Cohocton met with the Dodock coming from the hills to the south. He moved stiffly, unpacking his mule and laying things out, then carefully feeding his fine riding horse and big mule. By the time the two animals were fed and calm, it was dark, and his fire of birch and dry maple was the only light—or warmth—for many miles.

  He warmed his hands for a while and then fried some bacon in a small iron skillet with a folding handle.

  The horse began to be restless.

  The old man finished the bacon. Then he raised his head and looked into the darkness as if he could see into it.

  After a while, he went to the bags that the patient mule had carried all day, opened one, and took out a bottle of red wine. It was an incongruous thing in such a rough camp—the old man had no tent, no bed, and no cups.

  After a moment he produced a pair of horn cups.

  He went back to his fire and built it up. He produced a folding brass candlestick—cunningly wrought—put a beeswax candle into it and lit it with a snap of his fingers.

  A puff of wind blew it out.

  He relit it. When he turned his back, it went out again.

  He growled. Walking carefully in the darkness, he went over to the downed birch tree—the reason he’d chosen this site to camp—and stripped a long curl of bark.

  He went back to his candle stick and made a wind shade from the bark, and then relit the candle with another snap of his fingers.

  Then he sat on his rolled cloak and ate his bacon.

  When he was done, he looked around carefully—again—and then took his small iron skillet down to the brook and washed it with sand and small pebbles. The horse snorted.

  The old man went back to his fire, threw on a pair of small birch logs, and settled comfortably into a tree’s roots to rest. He looked at the stars, and at the moon high above him.

  He couldn’t help but smile.

  Carefully, he took a small pipe out of his purse, took tobacco from his hunting bag, and packed his pipe.
>
  “A new vice,” he said, the first words he’d said in days. “Well, well.”

  He was a handsome man, and not so very old, at that. He had heavy dark brows and salt and pepper hair tied back in a rough queue with deer hide thong. He wore a fine red caftan of wool lined in silk, and under that a good linen shirt, and he had Alban-style braes and hose and wore leather boots that would have reached his thighs if he had not rolled them down to his knees.

  A long sword rested against the tree by his head.

  He packed the pipe carefully, and then lit it from a coal at the outer edge of the fire. Sucked the smoke into his lungs and coughed.

  Blew a tentative smoke ring.

  “Come and have a cup of wine,” he called suddenly.

  Or maybe I’m just going mad, he thought.

  There was a rustle by the stream. The babble of the brook covered many sounds but didn’t cover them all.

  His new body had wonderful hearing compared to his old body. And was particularly good at waking up without stiffness.

  “Isss it good wine, I wonder?” asked a voice from beyond the fire.

  “It is,” the man said. He waved to the cups. “Would you pour?” He put the long-stemmed pipe to his lips and drew, then gradually blew the smoke out. It billowed in the light of the fire, seeming to flow and spread like water.

  When a breeze blew it away, there was a man—or rather, a human-like figure—standing by the fire. He was dressed all in red; red hose, red pourpoint, laced in red and tipped in gold.

  By the stream, a dozen faeries hovered, burning in their incandescent wonder.

  The old man—not so old—drew in more smoke. “Good evening,” he said.

  “A merry meeting, and you a mossst pleasssant tressspassser,” the figure said. “But the wine isss good.”

  “I am sorry for my tresspass,” said the man with the pipe. He waved it. “I have done little damage except burn some downed wood. I have not hunted.”