by Devin Hanson
“How many are in Andronath?” Jules asked, “And who are they, what are their names?”
“I never met anyone beyond my master in the Order. For my own protection,” Fawkes pleaded. “I swear it! Our meetings were held in hooded robes in the dark.”
“Then who is your master? Give me that!”
“An alchemist, goes by the name Lameda.”
“Bircham?” Jules asked disbelievingly, “Bircham Lameda?”
“Yes, yes, that’s him. Do you know him?”
“Well,” Andrew said, “that explains things.”
“That man! Oh, when I get my hands on him!” Jules fumed for a moment before asking, “Do you know any of the other Incantors in Khar Bora?”
Fawkes smirked. “I know a few. They try to hide it, but only the Speakers live in the West Wing, and their robes are richer than any I have seen before.”
“The Speakers are Incantors?” Andrew asked.
“At least three. There are many who live in the Arches.”
“How many among the balai?”
Fawkes shrugged. “I don’t know. The balai are not like those idiot Speakers. They are smart enough to hide, if there are any among them.”
“What of Rangers?”
“I’m sure. More than a few were fighters. The majority are alchemists, though. More than half.”
“I see. I have one more question,” Andrew said. “How is an Incantor made? What did you do to become more than just an alchemist?”
The Incantor nodded. “I can tell you, but I promise you, this is not a power you want any part of.”
“Believe me,” Jules snapped, “we aren’t so stupid as to take that first step. Just answer the question.”
“Very well. It begins with a rune.” He nodded down at the Ska rune on his arm. “You must apply it yourself after learning it and use a long needle so the ink will never fade. Then you consume the heart of a dragon.”
“You killed the northern dragons?” Andrew asked, disbelief wrinkling his forehead. “Somehow I find that hard to accept.”
“Oh, burn me, no. Wouldn’t that be a prize, though! Ha! No, we can only kill these desert dragons. The heart is packed in ice and brought north by stagecoach. It is a rare opportunity. I had to wait many years before mine came.”
“Then as long as we avoid eating any dragon hearts,” Andrew said with false cheer, “we should be safe.” Then he sighed and bowed his head, thinking.
Jules spoke first, “I can’t think of anything else I need to know.”
“Me neither.”
“Is it time?” Fawkes asked hopefully. “You will kill me now?”
“I should leave you to your fate for what you have done,” Jules said, but she shook her head as the man’s face paled. “I am not like you, so you will have your release.”
“Oh, thank yo–”
Jules stepped away fastidiously, wiping her runed blade clean as Fawkes lurched against his bonds, then trembled, blood surging from the wound in his neck.
Andrew watched in silence as the last tremors died away and the Incantor died. There was no doubting it this time, no coming back from the brink of death.
“I don’t understand,” Jules said quietly, “how someone could allow themselves to become so evil.”
“He didn’t start out evil,” Andrew said. “Ambitious, perhaps, but not evil. That came later, each step irreversible along the path, reasonable at first, then desperation drove him further.”
Jules wrapped her arms around herself. “The dragons are right to call this a corruption. Imagine trying to live with yourself while the voices of your victims whisper in your head.” She shuddered. “Andrew, how are we going to do this? How are we going to kill twenty-eight Incantors in just a few days?”
“Twenty-seven, now,” Andrew said with a small smile. “And I don’t know yet. But we’ll find a way. We have to.”
They were still contemplating the corpse when Iria returned. She halted after stepping through the doorway, folded her arms and regarded the dead Incantor with her lips pursed.
“You get what you need?” she finally asked.
“After a fashion,” Jules replied. “How did the meeting go?”
“Nobody showed up. I figured,” Iria nodded toward the corpse still tied to the chair, “this one set up the meeting, then showed up early. What did you discover?”
“We have the number of our enemy,” Jules said. “And three of them are among the Emperor’s Speakers.”
Iria seemed to wilt a little at the news. “I see. How many do we face?”
“Twenty-seven,” Andrew said.
“So many.” Iria frowned. “Just one was difficult enough to deal with, how will we eliminate that many?”
“First things first,” Jules said. “We have to find them before we can kill them.”
“If we had time, we could track them down, I am sure of it,” Iria said, “but our time is short.”
“Tracking them down will be impossible,” Andrew said, shaking his head. “As soon as we found a few, the rest would scatter. No, what we need is a way to get them to gather in one spot.”
“We can’t just pile hearts up in the street and stand by with a net,” Jules said dryly.
“Hearts? Why hearts?”
Andrew quickly explained what they had learned from the Incantor.
Iria’s reaction was fury. “That whole Ranger squad slaughtered to give Mohandi a boost to his power?” she hissed, her teeth barred. “Death is too good for him. I will cripple him and lock him away where he can have his mind consumed by those he ate.”
“You know, I have an idea,” Andrew said suddenly. “I know how to gather all the Incantors together.”
“Without hearts?” Iria asked.
“Yes. Jules, do you remember how Trent reacted when we forced him to return Ava’s egg?”
“He was furious. He seemed almost ready to take on Ava.”
“I bet if the Incantors knew there was a dragonet being brought into Khar Bora, a young northern dragon, they would show up to try and steal its heart. Especially since it grants everlasting life to the one that eats it.”
“Everlasting life? Where did you hear that?” Jules looked at Andrew askance. “And I hardly think Ava would let you use one of her eggs as bait. Besides, she isn’t here to deliver it, nor do we have time for her to make the trip.”
“Tiny gods, of course not.” Andrew shook his head. “Ava would kill me if I suggested it. We only need to make them believe one was captured. One of the legends about Incantors is that they live forever, so we say we captured a dragonet, spread the rumor of immortality for the one that eats the heart and set up an auction or something. The rats will come out of the woodwork at a run.”
“You know,” Jules said, a slow smile spreading across her face, “that might even work.”
Chapter 17
The Plan Takes Shape
Iria sat on the wagon seat, a borrowed short bow in her hand and a pair of full quivers lashed to the footboard in front of her. She wore the sand-colored robe of the balai, and her mask covered her face. She shifted in her seat, scanning around the wagon and chain mail chimed softly beneath her robes. Behind her, the wagon bed was entirely occupied by a cage constructed of heavy iron bars covered by a canvas tarp. Something shifted within the canvas, shadows that suggested wings beating and the covering stirred in the produced wind.
Mounted on horses, Jules and Andrew rode on the sides of the wagon. Andrew rode looking fierce, glowering at the people staring at them as they passed, despite his arm in its sling. Jules, in comparison, looked deadly simply by her lack of posturing and almost lazy evaluation of each person they passed.
And, in a loose circle about them, strode balai. Thirty or so cloaked figures all wearing the featureless sand mask and armed to the teeth. They were there at Iria’s invitation and they had come loaded for bear. None of them knew what was in the cage, but the heavy scent of cinnamon wafting from under the canvas left little to
the imagination.
Whispering followed the wagon, citizens leaned their heads together, wondering what was in the cage. Among the crowd, Iria could see urchins following at pace with the wagon, spreading the carefully constructed rumors.
The cage held a dragon from the north. No, just a baby. Worth more than its weight in solid gold. No, it was priceless. No, it was a gift for the Emperor. No, it was to be sold at auction. Immortality could be had if one ate the heart. Not immortality, but endless good luck. No, definitely immortality.
The urchins had been the Speaker’s idea, and she had to admit they were playing their part to perfection. A few silver coins each, and they worked the crowd like professionals. Iria knew how rumor spread in the city. By nightfall, the entire population of Khar Bora would be buzzing with news of the dragonet.
The truth was a bit simpler, of course. A few hours before sunrise, they had left the city from one of the gates on the far side of the city. The iron cage had been dismantled and hidden beneath the tarp. Once out of sight of the city, they combed the hills until they found a great big pile of incredibly rank dragon dung. The Speaker had said the dung would be out there, and probably not that hard to find. He seemed to have a knack for locating it.
Once the dung had been discovered, they had brought the wagon over and put the cage together before shoveling the dung into the bottom of the cart. Andrew had spent the ride back to the city rigging a pair of fans to a pull-chain inside the bars and carefully draping the canvas to cover the lot. The chain came out by Iria’s foot, and by stepping on it, she could cause the fans to stir a bit. It probably was not necessary, but Andrew insisted that an actual dragon would be flapping its wings a lot and it would seem odd if nothing was moving inside the cage.
The balai escort had met them outside the city by the gate closest to the palace and escorted them in past the gate guards, effectively skipping any sort of gate inspection that might ruin the ruse. So far, the plan was working perfectly. This many balai in one place was enough to get the rumor mill going by itself. The added rumors of the cage containing a captured dragonet and the heavy miasma of cinnamon that followed the wagon meant there would be little else talked about in the city.
Their destination was an open courtyard on the north-west edge of the promontory, deep within the palace. Iria had chosen it for its proximity to the northern edge of the city, the adjacent wide-open hall where they would presumably be holding the auction, and the relatively isolated location.
As they started working their way through the winding paths of the Arches, she noticed the Speaker kept turning to the north, staring at the walls with a look of expectation on his face. He spurred his horse forward and spoke with the Lady Vierra briefly, then pulled up level with the wagon seat.
“What is it?” Iria asked.
“My dragon, Avandakossi, is coming. She’s still far out, but at the rate she’s going, she’ll get here by nightfall.”
“You can tell that?”
“We have a… connection.” The Speaker turned his head to look to the north again, his eyes distant, his mouth turned down in a frown. “She is in haste.”
“Not all is well in Andronath,” Iria guessed.
Andrew looked at her, and she saw some of the fear he kept buried lurking behind his eyes. “I hope you’re wrong, but I have a feeling there is truth to that.”
“You will go to the north when Avandakossi gets here?”
The Speaker shook his head. “No. I made a promise to you and I will keep it. Unless the Incantors have made a concerted effort to attack Ava’s nest, nothing that happens in the north is more important.”
“Is that likely?”
Andrew grinned, an expression of wild amusement kept carefully controlled. “No,” he said simply. After a moment, he added, “Someday I will take you to the nesting grounds and you will see.”
Andrew fell back to converse quietly with Jules, leaving Iria to her thoughts. She had not made the vow to swear herself to the Speaker lightly. If through their efforts the army of dragons was turned aside and Nas Shahr saved, she would leave her service to the Emperor and follow Andrew wherever he led her. Iria had not really thought of what that meant before now, though.
For some reason, she had assumed he would be staying in the south. Of course he would not, though. His home was in Salia. Iria had traveled there briefly, but had never gone very far across God’s Reach. What would it be like living in a land covered in green? With the brief exception of the few weeks immediately following the annual monsoons, Nas Shahr was a land dominated by grey and brown.
How would she fare so far from the real land?
“Lieutenant!” a voice called in Maari, pulling Iria from her thoughts. A balai pacing the wagon drew his sand mask up and Iria recognized him as Sergeant Fakhir al Din, unofficial “leader” of the balai escorting the wagon.
“Fakhir, what is it?”
“We near the courtyard. I have sent a squad ahead to secure it and the hall.”
“Thank you. We will make the last approach with care.”
The sergeant nodded and turned away, birdsong trilling from his lips as he gave out orders. Iria followed with half her mind as she slowed the aurochs drawing the wagon to a slow walk. Several groups of balai split off from the protective circle around the wagon and vanished into nearby buildings. Iria stopped paying attention after a few seconds of listening, confident in the sergeant’s ability.
It was a little exhilarating commanding such a large force. The balai were desperately needed throughout the kingdom, and it was strange having so many in Khar Bora. Even stranger was the number that were willing to assist her. When she had a chance, she decided to ask al Din what was going on. For now, she was willing to accept the gift of their assistance without too much inspection.
She entered the courtyard and found it was deserted. A single balai was visible, waving her onward, and she passed through the inevitable arch and into the Court of the Rising Sun.
The courtyard played to its theme in every detail. To the east, the arches of the palace miraculously lined up to give a clear view straight through and out over the city proper. Northwards, the courtyard bordered on the promontory edge with a columned walkway tracing around to the west, where the cliff face dropped a thousand feed straight down into the Silent Sea. Murals and statuary celebrating the rising sun tastefully framed the wide open courtyard with enormous arches spanning far overhead supporting upper levels of the palace.
To their left as they entered the courtyard from the east, the Hall of Morning stood, framing the south end of the courtyard, its massive accordion doors collapsed into their recesses, giving Iria a straight shot into the hall. She drove the aurochs into the hall, the beasts’ hooves echoing on the polished marble floor. A dozen balai followed her into the hall, the rest spreading out to secure the courtyard. Even with thirty balai, the Rising Sun was a large piece of territory to secure.
With the balai’s help, she got the wagon positioned where she wanted it and posted six of the balai about the wagon.
“Nobody is to approach the wagon, on pain of death. I do not care who it is, unless it is the Emperor himself. And even then, he is not to approach without me or one of the Salians.”
“It will be done, Lieutenant,” one replied, giving her a closed fist salute. They spread out around the wagon in a wide circle and drew weapons, the ring of steel echoing softly against the marble walls of the hall.
Satisfied for now that the wagon and its cargo would remain secure, Iria strode from the hall. Jules had dismounted and was speaking to a score of caterers, describing how she wanted the hall arranged and the Rising Sun prepared. Iria vaguely recognized a few of the caterers as being infamous for their lavish parties.
Having no stomach for that sort of detail, Iria sought out the Speaker, and found him dismounted but still leading his horse, looking out over the edge of the promontory. The Silent Sea spread out before them. The day was exceptionally clear, and the mountain
peaks that rose on the far side of the lake were visible as a faint blue shadow on the horizon.
“Why is it called the Silent Sea?” he asked when she approached.
Iria leaned against the railing and looked out over the massive body of water, so strange in a land so dry. Far below, waves crashed against the rubble at the base of the cliff, adding a soft ambient susurration. “During the driest months, right before the monsoon season begins, the salt content of the lake is so high that waves cannot form. It was discovered during such a period.”
“I’ve been to the ocean,” the Speaker said softly, a small smile playing around the edges of his mouth, “but I’ve never seen a lake so large. Why aren’t the shores green?”
“The salt prevents things from growing. After it rains, the water is drinkable for a while and the level of the lake rises many feet. The shores bloom then and the crops are irrigated. Over the course of the year, the fresh water on the surface evaporates and mixes with the deeper layer of dense saltwater. At this time of the year, the water is much as the ocean is. Too salty to drink, but not so salty that the fish are driven into hibernation.”
“Nas Shahr is a strange place, Iria, but it’s beautiful in its way. I understand why the Maar praise the real land.”
“If you stay here much longer, you will never leave. I have seen this time and again.”
“Yeah. I don’t think Ava would like that. How’s the setup for tonight coming?”
“The Lady Vierra is organizing the auction.” Iria looked over her shoulder at the small crowd of caterers and cooks that surrounded Jules and shook her head. “It is good she does that.”
“At least she knows how to do it. I wouldn’t even know where to begin.”
“The trap will be set well.”
“Iria,” The Speaker turned to face her fully, his brow furrowed with worry, “what will we do when the auction starts? Our plans don’t really cover that detail.”