His thumb was on the lever, all set to bring the great beast down, when the figure on the dragon’s back, having removed the red cloth from her brow, sat up high and spun it over her head. There followed a quick zinging sound and then a sudden sharp pain in the side of the prince’s skull.
Tharfen had used her smallest stone, but it was sufficient to make the prince cry out. As he threw up his arms protectively, the harpoon was released, but its aim was way off course. It recoiled at the end of the rope and fell harmlessly into the sea. A jolt of alarm surged through the prince, for he now knew who it was that sat astride the great creature. If the streaming red hair hadn’t been clue enough, the obvious expertise with a sling and stone definitely was.
Half-dazed from the blow, he turned the crank, frantically trying to get the harpoon back into the boat. But already the dragon was swooping by close overhead, the rider swinging that sling of hers. The prince ducked just in time and the stone pinged off of the railing. Veering out of her descent, the dragon started circling above him. The rider’s voice, loud and commanding, reached him: “You will throw your weapons into the sea and surrender to me, or I will kill you.”
The prince didn’t answer; he crouched down beside the crank housing and kept desperately winding in the harpoon.
“You will answer me, or you will be burned to a cinder!” she yelled, looking at him over one shoulder as the dragon wheeled almost upside down over him. Quicker and quicker the prince turned the crank as the harpoon skidded back over the surface of the water, coming closer and closer to the boat. Tharfen let another stone go and it struck the Cyclops in the back. The next one struck him at the back of his left knee. But he continued cranking. “Do you really want me to send a sixth brother into the other world?”
He looked up, enraged. Tharfen sneered at him as he began drawing the harpoon up the side of the boat. She projected a thought into the dragon’s mind — bright flames exploding toward the boat below. But the initial flicker of light-blue fire that emerged from Poltorir’s mouth was meagre, hardly enough to form a tenuous corona around her lips. Tharfen let the great animal inhale fully and soar up. She tried to surrender more completely to the Xemion piece in her as she directed the dragon down toward the Cyclops while exhaling and projecting her most vivid picture of flames bursting from flames. This prompted a clicking sound deep in the dragon’s throat. Tharfen felt it in her thighs as she clenched the mighty neck. She felt the explosion of fire. A burst of incandescence curled back at her so hot she almost let go of the chain.
But the prince was agile. He let the harpoon go and ducked as the dragon swooped past. He flattened himself against the deck and the harpoon fell down the side of the ship and back into the sea.
Tharfen cycled the dragon around and it swooped at him from the other side, as she summoned once more that image of exploding flame. Again there was a click in the dragon’s throat, but this time there followed no explosion or eruption of blinding heat, only a quick burst of weak blue fire. Poltorir had eaten only a small portion of fire-berries and their power was now exhausted. There would be no more flames tonight. “You will throw your weapons into the sea and surrender to me or I will return with a hundred dragons and ignite every ship in your armada until the fire of them blots out the setting sun.”
“Coward!” Prince Icrix yelled up to her.
Tharfen laughed. “You are the one cringing on the bottom of a boat!”
“You are the one throwing stones and running away. You are the coward.”
“I could as easily slay you with my sword as I could an undefended lamb,” she yelled down scornfully.
He stood up, mastering his trembling as he faced her. She put her largest stone in the sling and whipped it at him with all her might, catching him in the chest and knocking him sprawling over the railing and into the sea, a sight observed with some delight by quite a number of his men who stood with telescopes on several nearby ships. Tharfen pulled out her sword and held it over her head as she swooped down on the Cyclops, who was now struggling in the sea. She had every intention of capturing or killing him, but suddenly the dragon pulled up out of her descent and bolted back up into the sky, heading east toward Ilde. Tharfen’s connection with the dragon had broken and now she sensed her desire: Poltorir yearned for the fireberry fields.
But Tharfen had other plans. Tugging at the chain, projecting her intent with all her will, she tried to drag the huge dragon’s snout around.
48
All I Have Where It Once Was Is Agony
Even though he looked much older, Saheli knew him immediately. “Xemion,” she said in a dry, cracked voice. She winced and put her hand over the deep wound in her chest. “Oh! Oh!” she groaned. She shifted her position a little and gritted her teeth and burst out angrily “Oh! Oh! That hurts.”
“You were stabbed,” he said somewhat numbly.
She looked up at him. “I know, Xemion.”
Her eyes! They had been green as hazel leaves before, now they were dark brown. “Saheli, the colour of your eyes has changed.”
“Get me willow root, I beg you,” she groaned. “Get me poppy.”
“Of course, of course.”
She continued groaning, rocking herself back and forth. As he turned to leave, Xemion saw for the first time in a corner of the room the body of Bargest, and he knew the dog was dead.
But there was no time to stop and let the grief vibrate through him. He ran immediately down to Vallaine’s herb room, where he gathered up some ground willow bark and poppy seed anodyne and put together a poultice for Saheli’s wound.
Back upstairs she grimaced with pain as he removed her chain mail vest to apply it.
“There was some kind of horrible dark wraith-like being that …” He struggled to find a way to say it. “She was being sucked into your chest, and …”
Saheli looked away. “I know,” she said at last. “You don’t have to worry. It … it was part of me that was cut away.” She stopped there, explaining no further, but he was beginning to understand.
“And now it has returned to you?” he asked, going pale.
Saheli nodded, but now that they had broached the topic of the piece that had returned to her she realized that something was still missing. It was something vital but she couldn’t think what it was. She looked down her body; she examined her hands, her fingers. Everything seemed to be in place. She shrugged and her mind drifted to other things as the herbs began to ease her pain.
Xemion told her about the five years that had gone by. Everything. About her death — or her near death — in the battle. About his use of a spell-made sword. About Montither’s brutal betrayal. And finally, about the Spell of Return. He had long dreaded what might happen in this moment, when she was finally once again alive and knew what he had done. Perhaps she would want her death. Perhaps she would demand he return it to her. Instead she was seized with a much more earthly fury.
“When I am healed enough, I intend to hunt that murderer Montither down and kill him,” she said angrily. This, too, was different. Despite all that had happened to her in her short life, Xemion had never heard Saheli speak of revenge before.
“When you are healed, there will be other calls upon you. The people of the city will need your … your leadership, and your skill with the sword.”
“I suppose so,” she said wearily.
“As soon as possible,” he said as she lay back.
“I’ve just been brought back to life,” she griped. “Surely I don’t have to sacrifice myself again?”
Xemion had never heard Saheli complain about her lot before. “No, you need to stay here and heal. But if and when the battle comes, my sword will need to be in it. No matter how ill-skilled I may be.” He thought then of Tharfen, and of how quickly she had overcome him. Then he thought of Poltorir and anger surged through him. She must have let the beast go.
“Wh
en do you think they will attack?” Saheli asked.
“I thought it might be tomorrow. Because tomorrow is the equinox, but there’s still no wind. They can’t attack us until the wind picks up.”
“And when it does?”
“Then they will surely come for us, and I will go and join the fight.”
“And what of that sword you used in the Phaer Tourney?”
He pointed to the fireplace and shivered, glancing again at the still body of Bargest. “It was controlling me. My dear dog over there burnt it to save me from it,” he said sadly.
Saheli looked over at Bargest, noticing the black curve of bone projecting from the dog’s back. Some of the fur had turned dark black and looked almost feathery in appearance. The claws had lengthened and curled.
“He used to be the dog of a mage, and the mage put various spells on him,” Xemion explained. “More than I knew.” He walked over and put his hand tenderly on Bargest’s still body. He shook his head. “There’s obviously something else going on here.”
Saheli returned to the subject at hand. “So you no longer have an undefeatable sword to help us then?”
“Nor any other spellcraft,” he said resignedly.
“Are you sure?” she asked.
“All I have where it once was is agony,” he said solemnly. “But I’m glad of that, because I don’t trust the power of it.”
Saheli just shrugged and said “I’m very hungry.”
He smiled, glad to change the subject. “I have just returned from the city with a package of Mr. Stilpkin’s herbs, vegetables, and concoctions.”
“What have you got?” she asked eagerly. He had never seen such appetite in her. How much, he wondered, had that dark being that entered her changed her? Outside a nightingale began to sing and it sounded so beautiful she put her hand to her heart. That was when she realized what it was she was missing: a heartbeat.
49
Icrix Hates
Icrix could have perished in the water. He had been the only person on board and there was no one there to throw out the ladder so he could climb back up into the boat. He had to bellow across the water to get someone from the Tezoth to row out and rescue him. It was humiliating. He had never felt such rage. How he hated that girl now. He needed to kill her as soon as possible, to wipe her out forever — and hopefully in the most painful way imaginable. The full power and necessity of hate was now quite clear to him. He just let it explode through that mighty monomaniacal intellect of his, and soon he had formed a plan.
He knew from his charts and calculations that tomorrow there would be a particularly long ebb tide that would leave the beach in front of the cliffs of Phaer Bay exposed again. It was the perfect time to attack even with a much smaller force. They wouldn’t be expecting an attack without the wind, but the wind wasn’t the only thing that could drive a great ship through the water. There was also mechanical energy.
He sent the boat that had rescued him back with an order that all the mother ships with attack vessels hidden in their holds should release their boats and crews and have them amass around the foremost four cargo vessels in order to fasten themselves to the ships and row them secretly forward.
His original plan had relied on the use of the new siege towers to get great numbers up the cliffs in order to overwhelm the city with force. Unfortunately the ships with siege towers were far back in the formation and it would take too long to move them forward, but he also had a goodly assortment of three-armed mountain climbers and fjordsmen equipped with the very latest equipment: grappling hooks, ropes, pulleys, pinions. He knew from his father’s information on the Phaer Isle that there was a large gap in the seawalls there. All he’d have to do is get some fjordsmen into Phaer Bay, get them up the cliffs, and then they could open the gates of the tunnel to the sea. Then six hundred of his finest cutthroats could get up into the city and do their work. Tharfen of Ilde would be saved for him though. He rubbed his hands together.
It was a fine plan. But it had brought him at last to a crossroads. His passion for science was important to him but now that he had felt the much deeper passion of true hatred it paled in comparison. His father had always told him the truth of the Cylopean way was the single-eyed focus on one goal, and now he knew his father had been right. He had been splitting his gaze.
He set a fine example with what he did next. In full view of the closest of the mother ships, he ordered the dogs to be brought up from the hold. Whether or not one could take three dogs and graft them into a three-headed dog was a question some other luckier inquirer would have to take on.
He could see instantly that none of these latest grafts had worked anyway. One of the dogs was dead and the tube between the other two had somehow been folded when they’d been moved out of the hold and both dogs were in a sad state. There were no goodbyes. He saluted the one moon as the crew tipped the yelping dogs over into the motionless surface of the sea. Somehow he had expected them to sink immediately, but the two that were still alive somehow got free of the tubing and began to swim away, their V-shaped wakes widening behind them till they were out of sight.
While the smaller boats used tackle from sails and ropes from winches and anchors to fasten themselves to the sides of the four chosen mother ships, the prince, having stowed the Greralia in the hold of the royal caravelle, called an assembly of the Cyclopes Elite Corps.
This august body, limited to members of the royal family, was nevertheless a large group. It included one hundred and fifty Cyclopes; the prince’s uncles, cousins, aunts, nephews, second cousins, and all of their cousins and grandnephews. They had all contributed mightily to the coffers of this expedition and they were eager for their share in avenging the shame brought upon the House of Ponerix by Tharfen of Ilde. As Icrix addressed them they checked the tension on their bow strings and filled their long quivers with sharpened arrows. They were a royal family but they were also a deadly fighting unit — the best-trained and most lethal archers in the world. They, along with their mounts, filled the caravelle entirely as they listened to the prince’s plan and cheered enthusiastically the ferocity of his new hatred.
In the other three ships, heavier by far with the load of their equipment, six hundred mercenaries, mountaineers, and fjordsmen nervously prepared for battle as the oarsmen in the small boats began to strain the great vessels forward and into the moon-mirroring stillness of the waters ahead.
50
A Transfer of Authority
Lirodello was ruined. He had given up his honour and his trust and his ethics for love, and now he had lost that love. He had broken his vow of mourning. He had absconded with slow Pathan fire knowing it was to be used in a kind of murder. And worst of all, he had stolen poison in order that a dragon might be killed. A dragon! The very symbol and emblem of the Phaer people and their hopes for the future. If only there was someone as capable as he to turn his office over to, he would have surrendered it immediately. He no longer trusted himself with the position. Who knows how much more he might betray it if she returned to him offering just one more kiss. If indeed she had even left him. He hoped so. He hoped not.
He wept and laughed alternately as he made his way under the moonlight to check the work on the palisades that he had ordered erected along the edge of the cliff. He felt more like hurling himself off it than inspecting its defences, but as deceitful as he had been, he was still the governor of the city of Ulde and people were still relying on him. It was the eve of the Equinox and many of them were out tonight strolling in the night air or carousing with ale kones and singing rounds, but they left Lirodello alone. It wasn’t hard to sense his sombre mood.
He was not far from the cliffs when the midnight sky grew even darker. Suddenly, screams erupted and a dragon was descending. Everyone around him fled and hid but Lirodello just stood there looking up as the shadow grew larger and larger over him.
This seemed like a mystical
moment to him. In the stories told by the people of Loceklis, dragons often took vengeance upon evildoers, and he was definitely an evildoer. He just stood there entranced, resolute and ready to die. At the last moment, though, Poltorir shifted her descent and landed right in front of him, her dark black eyes staring straight into his face. In that moment terror finally overtook Lirodello and he reached for his sword.
“Put it down, Lirodello, or you will anger her,” a familiar voice shouted. He looked up and there was Tharfen lifting one leg over the dragon’s hump and letting herself down to the ground. Lirodello silently obeyed, staring at her, stunned. With her long red hair only partially bound by the red sash, she walked around him and stood looking into the great saurian face. Her eyes met those of the dragon, and she said. “Thank you, Poltorir.” The dragon couldn’t look away. There was a bond between the two of them now. She patted the giant snout, maintaining her communion with the dragon’s eyes. “Go now,” she whispered. “Be free.”
There were sounds of suction as the dragon’s wings lifted and air rushed in under them. Wind and dust rose up around Lirodello and Tharfen and the dragon leapt so fast it was like black backward lightning into the sky. The dark wings filled fully with one loud pop and Poltorir sped off under the moonlight toward the forest of Ilde.
Lirodello hardly knew what to feel let alone what to say. He had been ready to die. He just kept staring at Tharfen as she followed Poltorir’s flight. The last time he’d seen her she had been swollen and unconscious. “You appear to have fully recovered,” he said, feeling foolish.
Not till Poltorir was out of sight did Tharfen turn to Lirodello. She answered him calmly. “Yes, I am recovered, Lirodello. But I have just seen the size of the armada out there, and if the wind ever blows again, I fear the city is doomed.”
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