When Dragons Rage

by Michael A. Stackpole

  He pulled his head up, then sneezed violently, smacking his forehead into the ground. The straw did cushion the blow, but the magick didn’t stop him from hurting himself. “Ow!” He rolled onto his back and brought his hands up to his forehead, whacking his jaw with the left manacle in the process.

  He felt the lump growing on his forehead and the tightness of the chains on his legs. The hissed giggling continued, at a higher pitch now, and another rock clicked off his thigh. Instinctively he turned to the right to protect himself, but another rock hit his stomach hard. He twisted away from that line of attack, got hit again, then rolled away and landed on a rock that jabbed him good and solidly in the back.

  “OW!” He arched his back and dug away at the stone. Grasping it in both hands, he pushed himself up onto his right hip and went to raise his hands to throw it, but with his legs bound he flopped over awkwardly. To make matters worse yet another stone skipped off his head, sending a hideously sharp sound through his skull.

  He ducked his head and pulled his legs up. He had to get free, but the only way he could do that would be by using a spell. The rocks kept invoking the armor, which destroyed any spells he was trying to cast. I’ll have to cast the spell very fast. He frowned. Faster than I’ve ever cast a spell before.

  He went through a catalogue of spells he could use to get the shackles off. Most involved heating the metal until it melted, which would have melted his hands off as well. He knew there were some basic lock-picking spells, but he’d never been taught them. This had not prevented him from fashioning some of his own, based on healing spells. A diagnostic spell would show him how the lock had been constructed, then a modified levitation spell would let him manipulate the pieces of the lock to open it.

  These shackles can’t be that different in construction than a door lock.

  He gathered himself to cast the diagnostic spell quickly, but the rocks kept coming in a steady stream. He tried to ignore them, but it didn’t matter. The magick meant to save his life was preventing him from escaping. There is nothing I can do!

  Howling with frustration, he raised the rock in his right hand and smashed it down on the manacle on his left wrist. It rang loudly and produced a quick spark that died on the prison’s damp stone floor. The light hadn’t been much, revealing only grey stone and blond straw chaff, but he had seen it.

  The rocks stopped flying.

  It took Kerrigan a moment or two to accept that this was truly the case. Once he did, he smiled and started to cast the diagnostic spell.

  Thwock!

  “Stop it!”

  “Soppit, soppit, soppit . . .” The sibilant voice repeated the mocking word in a pitiful tone. The origin point for the voice shifted around and around, with little clicks occasionally accompanying it, as his tormentor circled him. “Soppit, soppit, soppit.”

  Kerrigan again tried to cast a spell, but a rock stopped him. He tried again and again, hoping that one rock might miss him and he might get his spell to work, but at that range his assailant never missed. In fact, from the high angle of some of the attacks, Kerrigan knew the invisible creature had raced in and hurled the stone down at him.

  Not being stupid, Kerrigan realized that he wasn’t going to cast a spell unless he had respite from the stones. The only time he stopped was . . . Quickly the magicker hammered a manacle with a stone. It rang loudly, but the stones still came. Kerrigan hit it again, glancing it, and striking a spark.

  The rocks stopped and silence again reigned.

  Kerrigan hit the manacle again and another spark ignited. No stone flew. The youth allowed himself a smile that broadened quickly. With his left hand he swept straw dust into a little pile and struck a spark into it.

  The spark survived just long enough for a small thread of smoke to drift up.

  Again and again Kerrigan pounded the manacle with the rock. It didn’t matter to him that the glancing blows tore at his skin. His wrist was soon slick with blood, but still he struck, flicking spark after spark into his pile of tinder. He blew gently on it, getting sparks to glow brightly before they died. He learned now to avoid scattering the tinder, and between sparks he grabbed straw and crumbled it into more dust.

  The hail of stones had stopped, but Kerrigan didn’t give a thought to casting a spell. Somehow the creature knew when he was invoking magick. How, he didn’t care. He just wanted the torment to stop, and it had. He didn’t know if the creature was afraid of fire, or fascinated by it; but if producing it would keep the thing occupied, he was determined to do it.

  As he worked he thought back to the Okrannel campaign and the trip south from Fortress Draconis. Though Kerrigan knew very well the spell that would kindle fire, he’d not been allowed to do it on the trip. Orla had not wanted him to become some hedge-wizard in the eyes of the soldiers. On the retreat from Fortress Draconis the princess had noted that he had more important things to be doing than worrying about making fires since others could do that.

  Others could. He’d even watched children kindle fires. Yet here I am, and I can’t do that. He wished he’d watched more closely, for it would have made the whole task easier. Still, as smart as he was, he slowly reconstructed the procedure.

  Finally, a spark caught. He blew gently on it and got embers. Another breath and a little flame popped into life. Kerrigan fed a small piece of straw into it, then another. Carefully, gently he fed it, letting it grow. The fire ate the straw quickly, so he twisted stalks and knotted them to make them burn more slowly.

  He smiled when he felt heat. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to remind him how cold he was. Still, it was heat, and there was light, some real light. Staring across the fire limited his vision, but he caught faint hints of the walls and clearly saw the iron ring into which his chains had been slipped.

  Kerrigan sat up, his smile very broad as his little fire guttered merrily.

  A wave of magick swept into the room. Kerrigan felt it and tried to study the spell, but its complexity defied casual observation. The spell sank into the chains that held him and locked their links. The chains tightened on his legs and held his arms to his thighs.

  A very cool and low voice spoke from above and behind him. “Very good, Adept Reese, you have learned your first lesson. Magick is not life.”

  “Who are you? Where am I? What do you want with me?”

  “Three very good questions.” The voice remained even and calm. “You will have the opportunity to earn the answers to them.”

  “Answer one now. I made a fire. That’s what you wanted me to do, wasn’t it?”

  “No.” Another spell sped through the room and Kerrigan recognized it instantly. It was the first spell taught to every apprentice. It was the spell they learned before they learned how to make fire.

  His fire went out.

  “No, no! Not fair. I did what you wanted.”

  “Listen, Kerrigan Reese. Very little in life is fair. You were born with vast potential for working magick. The world needs you, but you have been held apart from it. And because of your distance, you could easily do more damage than help. This must be determined.”

  Something hit Kerrigan in the back. It was soft and slid down against his buttocks. He couldn’t see it, but it felt like a blanket.

  “You now have some idea how desperate a man can be to create a fire when he is cold. Imagine those were not stones, but were raindrops or snowflakes. Imagine that the cold in your limbs made your hands numb. Imagine that huddled in the darkness was your family. Your wife, hungry and cold, your children terrified. The baby probably already dead. When you saw that spark, hope would soar. When it died, hope would die, and you would know your family was going to die along with it.

  “You, Kerrigan Reese, might be that spark. If you don’t understand how important you are, you will be far too dangerous to be allowed to live.” The voice did not rise on that point, making it less a threat than a simple fact. “Think on what I have said. Cast no magick or you will be punished.”

  “Bu
t I’m bleeding.”

  “And how would one who has no magick deal with that, Adept?” The voice grew distant. “Remember first you are a man and then, perhaps, you will be able to save mankind.”

  CHAPTER 21

  W ill snarled and cursed as he kicked his way through brown slush. He didn’t care if it splashed up on him—his anger insulated him from the cold. As for the state it left his clothes in, he didn’t care about that, either. The clothes, titles, all that stuff was stupid and he hated it.

  He spun around and looked back at the palace. The tops of the towers already hid beneath fluffy white blankets of falling snow. It looked very peaceful, which was ridiculous given who was in there at the moment. And the guards, all of them, should have been rushing to the palace to kill the sullanciri. That much seemed blatantly obvious to Will, but everyone else seemed to think a flag of truce meant something.

  It means you’re missing a chance to kill Nefrai-kesh, that’s what it means.

  Growing up in the Dimandowns wasn’t easy, but at least he’d learned some hard lessons. The slums of Yslin were a place where truces lasted for as long as it took someone to get more people on his side. If Nefrai-kesh had shown up there the way he showed up in Meredo, he’d have been ripped apart. And, given what he was, even if they hadn’t killed him, they certainly wouldn’t have believed anything he had to say.

  Will turned his back on the palace and continued trudging through the snow. The way nobility acted never ceased to surprise him. On one hand you had folks like King Augustus, who were good and noble most of the time, but who admitted they didn’t act well toward a friend. On the other hand you had Scrainwood, for whom Will actually would take a bucket of warm piss in exchange. And in between you had folks who could be greedy and grubby, or who would tell you whatever they thought you wanted to hear, or just had folks who had no idea what life was like in the world of the streets. They all seemed stupid.

  He frowned because he didn’t want to classify Princess Alexia as a noble in that regard. She really was different, but even she hadn’t done anything about Nefrai-kesh. He did allow as how she didn’t have a magick sword with her to kill him—Resolute had one, but he wasn’t there. And Crow’s sword, Tsamoc, now resided in the princess’ room, where it was no help. Still and all, he was pretty sure she had to have seen the stupidity of leaving Nefrai-kesh alive.

  A shiver ran down his spine. He really had been ready to shove his little dagger into the thing that had been his grandfather, but that hadn’t scared the sullanciri. He’d just opened his arms and said that Will could come to him. Nefrai-kesh had said that Will would be his heir.

  “I don’t want to be your heir.” Will snarled loudly and stamped his feet. “It’s because of you I’m in this mess!”

  The absurdity of his complaint struck Will and made him laugh for a moment. He looked up, seeing if anyone else thought things were as silly as he did; but what he saw surprised him because most folks were completely ignoring him. They just paid him no mind, and that astonished him because even walking to the palace to attend the trial he had constantly been subjected to profuse wishes of good will by folks he didn’t even know.

  But now, now everyone treats me as if I don’t exist! He wondered at that for a moment, then his jaw dropped open. Of course, the mask! The mask he’d left lying in the court had been the thing people recognized. Oriosans could read masks as easily as Will could calculate the worth of a purse by how it bulged. He might be Will Norrington, but Lord Norrington wore a specific mask and without it he was nothing.

  He mulled over the irony that meant not wearing a disguise made him invisible, but realized it was just a reversal of the sort of misdirection he and his companions had used when cutting purses in Yslin. Working a crowd, he’d find a target. At a signal two of his confederates would start a fight, jostling people, including the target. As they bumped into him, Will would clip his purse and slip away quietly. All the attention had been drawn to the fighting kids and since no one was watching him, he got away cleanly.

  Here the lack of a mask meant that you were beneath notice or, if not that, certainly below the interest of those who could wear masks. Will knew enough of history to know that Muroso, Alosa, and Oriosa had, at one time, been provinces that rebelled against an empire. The rebels had worn masks to disguise themselves as they fought against the empire, and when they won independence, those who had fought for it became the new nobility. To them and their descendants went the right to wear a mask, and the decorations on their masks marked their importance.

  Because of the masks, the Oriosans constantly seemed to be looking for symbols and significance in things. Will was certain that tugging off his mask and throwing it on the floor would be seen as having all sorts of portents and meaning, while he’d just done it because he wanted to throw something and wasn’t going to throw the dagger, which he liked.

  He shook his head, imagining them thinking it was a rejection of his citizenship. Since the masks of the dead were often kept by the family, tossing it toward Nefrai-kesh could be taken as a sign that he was saying that the sullanciri should just consider him dead. Or it could be taken as a gesture of his rejecting the niceties of the court and vowing to wage his own war against Chytrine.

  There were many more things, and he assumed that gossip mills would be grinding away long hours making them up. He didn’t like the idea that some folks would think he was walking away from the war with Chytrine. That would probably be the darkest of the omens read in what he had done. There had to be a way to put that to rights, but exactly how to do it, he wasn’t certain.

  More symbols, and the Oriosans will believe in me again. They all do things with reasons, and as long as I have a good one, they’ll believe me. Will sighed. He knew he’d have to figure things out. He’d have liked to talk to Kerrigan about it, since the mage’s perspective on things was even weirder than that of the average Oriosan. Kerrigan, however, had gone missing, and Lombo was out hunting him. The Vilwanese consulate had reported back to Princess Alexia that they didn’t know where he was, and their courier sounded nervous enough that Will believed the Vilwanese didn’t have him.

  The idea that Oriosans always do something for a reason began to bounce around inside Will’s skull. He started to wonder what purpose Nefrai-kesh would have for showing up at the trial. Sure, his appearance in the palace was likely to scare a lot of folks—Scrainwood first among them. But a better way to scare a lot of folks would have been for the sullanciri just to kill Scrainwood. Having Linchmere on the throne would have terrified everyone in Oriosa and well beyond its borders.

  The sullanciri couldn’t actually have intended to come to give testimony. That made no sense whatsoever. Crow’s fate really didn’t matter, and if Chytrine wanted Crow dead, she could have sent the sullanciri into his cell. Making folks use the laws of a nation to kill an innocent man might strike some nobles as a horrible thing, but Will was fresh from war and knew that anything Scrainwood might have done to Crow would be, odds on, more pleasant than the sort of death found on a battlefield.

  By the gods—I should have seen it immediately! Will began to run through the streets, dodging carts, slipping in muddy slush, going down, splashing, getting up again, and continuing as fast as he could. He leaped over snowdrifts, ducked, and twisted through the middle of a snowball war and shoved slower people aside. Ignoring the cries of the few who went down, he sped on, ever faster, toward the Rampant Panther.

  There was only one reason that Nefrai-kesh would risk showing up at the trial, and that was misdirection. If there was going to be any alarm sent up, it would summon all of the guards to the palace. And the false flag of truce makes folks believe he means no harm, but I don’t believe that at all. Putting Nefrai-kesh in the palace was a risk, but Chytrine would only undertake that risk for a greater gain, and there was only one thing in Meredo that she wanted that badly.

  The ruby fragment of the DragonCrown!

  Will burst through the inn’s door
and bolted immediately for the stairs to the rooms. He held his left hand up beside his face, half in a wave, but mostly to hide the fact that he had no mask on. He hit the landing and doubled back to the second floor, then dashed along the corridor toward the last room on the right.

  Time slowed for Will despite his haste. He studied the floor at that end of the corridor, for Kerrigan’s room was right across the hall from his own. Before leaving that morning he’d checked Kerrigan’s room and had placed a thread between the door and the jamb that would fall out if the door had been opened. More important, Will had used lampblack to darken a couple of knots in the wooden flooring. Had a boot brushed over them, the scuff marks would have showed clearly. Will had avoided them himself, and Resolute had been warned, so only a thief would run afoul of it.

  Or Kerrigan, which would be a big help.

  As he neared the door he picked the dark thread out against the blond wood. That allowed him a touch of relief, then he slowed and dropped to one knee to survey the knots. Two remained black as puddles of ink, but the third had changed. No streaks, as if anyone had stepped on it, but it had a big flat splash of grey in it.

  Dust.

  Will looked up at the short rafter running across the width of the corridor. The dust up there had to be thicker than the snow in the streets, and it was possible a cat had wandered along that beam, but Will wasn’t of a mind to be considering cats when a thief might be about. Glancing at the wall above the door, he saw a couple of faint marks, the origin of which he couldn’t imagine, but he knew they’d not been there earlier. Which meant someone was stealing his DragonCrown fragment.

  Drawing his dagger, Will stepped to the door and opened it. The oil lamp behind him stabbed a wedge of yellow light into the tiny room that had housed Kerrigan. The thief’s line of sight was drawn upward, to the rafter’s continuation in the room, and the figure hunched and huddled in the lurid scarlet glow. What he saw sent two emotions through him, the first quickly being subsumed by the second.