The Dragon Nimbus Novels: Volume III: Volume III

by Irene Radford

  He listened with his ears and his mind, pinpointing each of his men as they sneezed, shuffled their feet, or murmured a question. So far, none of Piedro’s guards shared the huge hall. Where were they? Usually he had to dodge a dozen or more just to get this far.

  Slowly he eased around the archway, keeping his shadow cloak close and solid. He’d pay for the magic trick later in hunger and exhaustion. Better to be tired and hungry than dead.

  Stargods! He wanted to get home. Ending the Great Wars of Disruption and establishing the Commune of Magicians had been easier than trying to survive in Hanassa. Longing for Nimbulan and his friends in the Commune welled up in his throat, threatening to choke him.

  He swallowed the emotion. Any emotion was dangerous right now. He needed to maintain tight control of himself if he hoped to survive tonight.

  Once inside the hall, he remained close to the wall. Only his eyes moved. He peered into every crevice, nook, and shadow.

  The hideous stone altar, with its hand and foot manacles at each corner, rested flush with the floor now. Piedro didn’t know how to make it rise from its sunken position. The secret had died with Yaassima. The new Kaaliph still executed people, but the bloodletting lacked the aura of a religious ritual without the altar.

  If Piedro met an ignominious end in the near future, the worship of Simurgh might very well die with him.

  The tapestry behind the dais to Rollett’s left hung limp and tattered. Not enough of the peaceful alpine meadow with a waterfall scene remained to conceal an armed guard.

  The room seemed empty except for Rollett’s raiders.

  He signaled quiet to the seven men as he stepped from the shadows. Keeping his back to the walls, he circled the room to the far side where a smaller door lay hidden behind another tapestry—this one portrayed an orgy in vivid and obscene detail.

  All of his men waited for him to lead the way. Rollett paused and listened again. The interior corridor remained quiet and empty. He probed it with every mundane and magic sense available to him. But he didn’t trust those senses tonight. They should have roused at least ten guards by this time. None of them patrolled their usual routes or slept in their usual hiding places.

  Piedro had set a trap. Where?

  If his men didn’t need fresh food so desperately, he’d abandon the raid right here and now. By tomorrow night the new shipment would be moved somewhere more secure deep in the labyrinth of these caves. Rollett had yet to find that location. They had to steal the food tonight or not at all.

  Rollett pointed to his eyes and ears, warning his men to be extra alert. Then he gestured for them to follow him silently.

  The corridor sloped gently downward before curving to the right. Three smaller passageways opened on the left before they reached a major junction. The right-hand passageway sloped downward. The left continued straight ahead, level and wide open. From experience, they knew the easy path terminated in a dead end. He’d never explored to the right. The memory of the scent of fresh food drove him up the slope to the center.

  Rollett’s mouth began to salivate. He needed to run ahead and grab a handful of fruit and nuts. He could devour an entire ham by himself. Caution made him proceed slowly.

  As he approached the last twist in the corridor, he held up his hand to halt the men. Once more he listened with every sense available to him. Quiet. Too quiet.

  He waited through one hundred heartbeats. Still nothing. He listened for another one hundred heartbeats.

  This time he heard what had been missing in the rest of the palace complex, the sound of soft uneven breathing. Several men waited just inside the open door of the storeroom.

  Rollett held his breath. Did he dare go through with the raid? His stomach growled. They needed the food stored here.

  But something more was wrong than just the presence of the guards lying in wait. The storeroom smelled wrong. It smelled empty of food.

  The man just behind him shifted his posture forward. Rollett put out his hand to restrain him. Too late.

  “Food!” The three men behind him broke into a howling run, clubs raised.

  “Wait,” Rollett ordered. They ignored him, too desperate to listen to anything.

  He had no choice. He had to follow them into the trap, defend them any way he could. Staff raised, senses alert, he charged after his men. The remaining men in his gang unleashed daggers and boot knives as they, too, joined the fray.

  Lights flashed inside the storeroom, blinding the raiders. Rollett resisted the urge to cover his eyes with his hands. He had other senses to compensate for the dazzle blindness. His men didn’t have that advantage.

  Even before his vision recovered, Rollett knew the battle was hopeless. He heard the screams of dying men as he blocked a sword slash with his staff. The metal bounced off the hardened and twisted wood.

  Shadows took on substance before Rollett’s eyes. He flipped his staff end over end, catching the attacking guard under the chin. The big man staggered back, flailing his arms.

  Rollett’s men didn’t fare so well. He counted two down, bleeding heavily. The others were sorely pressed and outnumbered two to one.

  “Retreat!” he called even as he swung his staff into the belly of a palace guard. “Retreat!”

  Rollett followed his own order, backing out of the storeroom. Two guards pursued him closely.

  Rollett spun and ran back down the curving corridor. He hated to leave his men. They’d have to fend for themselves. Those were the rules in Hanassa.

  Loose sand on the floor turned slippery beneath his hurried footsteps. Rollett skidded into the junction. A wall of new guards blocked the main corridor back to the Justice Hall. He’d never break through them. Even with magic he’d be hard-pressed to battle them all.

  And he had no more magic. His limited reserves had gone into shadows and concealment getting into the palace.

  He increased his speed and his skid, turning the sharp corner into the unexplored downward slope.

  Stargods! I hope this isn’t another dead end.

  Sweat rolled down Rollett’s back. His limbs grew heavy. His lungs labored to draw in the hot air and his heart pounded loudly in his ears. Almost as loud as the heavy footsteps pounding the dirt floor behind him.

  The slope increased. The walls became rougher, more like a natural cave, without evidence of being smoothed or enlarged by man-made tools.

  His footing grew precarious on the light covering of fine sand. But so did the guards’ behind him. A sharp turn appeared before him. He tried to slow his steps and slammed into the wall. The loose sand upset his balance and kept him stumbling forward. He lunged in the new direction, trying to control his momentum. His feet flew out in different directions. He landed heavily on his side.

  As he measured his length along the corridor, he rammed his head against the crossed iron bars of a locked gate.

  Chapter 15

  The pit beneath the city of Hanassa, time unknown

  “All the caverns lead back to Old Bertha,” Powwell said as he kicked one of the rusted pipes strewn about the huge cave. They’d been wandering for hours. Days? He didn’t know anymore. Their trips through the dragongate had disrupted his time perception. He needed to eat and sleep before he could restore all of his senses.

  “The caverns have always led back here,” Yaala replied. Her eyes took on a glazed look of enthrallment. She grabbed the broken pipe and lovingly began to scrape rust off of it with her belt knife. The blade quickly dulled, but she ignored it, completely absorbed in her task and the plight of her machines.

  “No, Yaala. The tunnels and caverns all led to the rim of the pit. This cavern only has one or two accesses overlooking the lava core. There are dozens of others. How do we get to them?” Powwell checked the exit tunnel that also gave access to the dragongate. So far, it hadn’t opened again while he watched. Something was terribly wrong. The opening and closing had always been random, but rarely more than one hundred to one thousand heartbeats apart.

>   “Well, we found the living cavern. It’s empty of people, but full of food. We’ll be all right for now.” Yaala continued to clean the broken pipe, frequently comparing the open end with the other pieces.

  “Wake up, Yaala. Think. We have to get out of here.” He grabbed her shoulders and shook her. She dropped the sections of pipe. Hot water splashed them both.

  “We can’t do anything without the machines. Old Bertha needs me,” she protested when he stopped shaking her.

  “Hanassa needs you, Yaala. The city needs a strong leader. The machines are nothing. They aren’t power, they are tools.”

  She stared at him as if he were the most stupid being on Kardia Hodos.

  “I need you, Yaala. I need you to help me find my little sister. I need your strength to keep me from lashing out and murdering everyone in your city until I find Kalen. We need to find Rollett and send him home to help Nimbulan. Now stop fussing with Old Bertha and help me find a way out of here.”

  She turned her head away not answering.

  Powwell watched the access tunnel again for signs of the dragongate opening. But he maintained his grasp on her shoulders, needing the physical affirmation that they both still lived, still had quests to keep them going.

  “There. That’s two pieces together. I bet I can reconstruct the entire pipe. Then I’ll clear the tube tunnels of debris and restring the wires to Liise. She doesn’t give off much ’tricity, but I should be able to coax enough out of her to control some of the ’motes,” Yaala said. “Perhaps we can use Liise to jump-start Old Bertha.”

  “What good are ’tricity and ’motes that mimic magic if we can’t get out of the pit to use them? What use are they in helping me find Kalen? Especially if they carry the seed of the plague. You won’t have a city to reclaim if your blasted machines breed a plague that kills everyone. Including us.”

  “My machines would never hurt anyone.” Yaala wrestled away from his grasp and resumed her work with the rusted pipe. “I need to know more about ’tricity and Yaassima’s gadgets before I reclaim my heritage.”

  Kalen, with her sullen silences and selfish need to control the people around her seemed more attractive to him now than Yaala obsessed with the generators and transformers.

  He longed to tell his sister everything that had happened to him since their separation. She fed his ideas with twists and “what ifs” that gave him new insight into problems, and into life.

  Had she grown in the last year? Did she still have Wiggles, her ferret familiar?

  “Of course you have to find Kalen,” Yaala said after several moments of silence. “You won’t be happy until you do. Then you can come back here and help me with the machines.”

  “No, Yaala. I won’t come back here, ever, once Kalen is free.”

  She didn’t seem to hear him. The machines held her attention completely. Almost as if they threw a spell over her.

  Becoming Kaalipha and ruling Hanassa was just an excuse to be close to her machines. He should have known this would happen. The machines were her family; she had returned to them. Would Powwell ever return to the Commune? Not without his sister.

  “So why have the caverns changed? It takes more than one kardiaquake to move a labyrinth this large.” Powwell decided to change the subject.

  “Some of the tunnels have collapsed. Yes. Maybe we mistook the way out because of debris blocking the main exit from the living cavern.” Yaala’s eyes brightened a little as her thought processes moved away from her broken machines.

  “Or maybe the wraith has disguised the exit so we can’t leave,” Powwell mused as he caught another glimpse of drifting white off to the side. He turned to look straight at the place where the wraith had been, but it—she?—had disappeared again.

  “You go look, Powwell. I just want to check one thing. . . .”

  “We’re in this together, Yaala. Come. Now. You can play with your toys after we find a way out.” He grabbed her hand and dragged her back toward the cavern that held the food stores. At one time it had been home to several hundred slaves including Yaala and himself. They’d all looked to Yaala for leadership. Had she been this obsessed then?

  Powwell stopped at the first tunnel junction. He looked left. If his memory held true, he thought the tunnel narrowed and dead-ended. Then he looked right. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up. Thorny bristled and jabbed Powwell with his spines, urging him left—away from the atavistic sense of dread in the right-hand tunnel. Something nasty awaited them. They needed to turn back, try a different direction. The hedgehog gibbered in panic. Powwell pushed forward through that tunnel anyway. The last three times he’d explored this area, he’d avoided the tunnels that made him too aware of the weight of tons of kardia pressing down on the flimsy cave system; too aware of the limited supply of air; too aware of his own mortality.

  Powwell pressed on, pushing away his fears. He kept telling himself that the wraith wanted him to stay. She was making him and Thorny sense terrors that didn’t truly exist.

  They passed through the living cavern without pausing to drink from the foul-tasting stream. He’d drunk too much of the sulfurous water a year ago because there was nothing else to keep his body from withering into a pile of dust in the tremendous heat of the caverns. Even Thorny didn’t beg for a drink.

  At last the tunnels began to slope upward. The air freshened, and the temperature decreased. “I think we’ve found it, Yaala.” He tugged on her hand to hurry. He couldn’t get out of the caves too soon.

  They slowed on the last slope upward to the gate. Instinctively, they hugged the shadows near the wall. Liise’s yellow ceiling lights didn’t reach this far, so they had to pick their way carefully over the uneven pathway. The glow behind them blinded them to the darkness in front.

  Powwell closed his eyes and stretched his magic senses. He didn’t have much dragon magic left. Thorny’s sense of smell was probably more accurate than Powwell’s TrueSight at this point.

  “Thorny smells a human up ahead,” he whispered, pausing to share the sense with his familiar. “Blood and sweat and fear.”

  “Who?” Yaala asked, peering into the darkness.

  “Only one way to find out. Keep quiet.” Slowly they crept forward, hands linked tightly together. Powwell stretched his other hand in front of him.

  At last he grasped one of the metal crossbars of the gate. A glow of light from higher in the tunnel helped him distinguish the interlocking pattern. He found the square plate that housed the lock. Beneath the lock lay an inert figure, more rags than anything else.

  Gently he prodded the head region of the lump.

  “Huh?” a man shook his head and peered up with bleary eyes.

  “Rollett?” Powwell asked. “I’d know those blond streaks in your black beard any day. Rollett, what are you doing here?”

  “I should have died with the others,” Rollett mumbled.

  Near midnight at the gate between the pit and the Kaaliph of Hanassa’s palace

  Yaala stooped to look closer at the bundle of rags that spoke. The little bit of glow from the lower caverns showed lighter streaks in the man’s dark beard and hair. By the same light she saw the glimmer of moisture in his eyes.

  “I’ve got to go back. My men are dying up there.” Rollett stirred as if he meant to stand, then collapsed against the iron bars of the gate again.

  “Where are you hurt?” she asked him.

  “I . . . maybe. I hurt all over. But wounds?” He patted his mid-region. His hands came up dry. “No blood.” He shrugged. Then he winced as if his head hurt at the movement.

  “Powwell, give me some light,” she ordered.

  “You’ve got to get out of here,” Rollett whispered anxiously. “The guards are right behind me. They’re out for blood. My blood. They already killed three of my men.”

  “The corridor is empty,” Powwell said. He opened his clenched fist to reveal a ball of witchlight.

  “What?” Rollett reared up on one elbow. He looked up
the sloping path toward the palace, his aches and pains forgotten.

  “Thorny doesn’t smell anyone but us, and my magic isn’t quivering—except for the wraith,” Powwell said. The tiny hedgehog poked his funny head out of Powwell’s pocket, wiggling his nose. He stayed out rather than darting back into cover, a sure sign that no one approached them.

  “You sure? They were right on my heels, screaming to kill me. Piedro laid a trap for me and my men. My men . . .” He groaned and lay back down again. “I’ve failed them. And myself.”

  “Is this the same Piedro who tried to assassinate the queen on the eve of her wedding?” Yaala asked. A gnawing suspicion grew deep within her. Piedro knew how the dragongate worked. He also had a confederate in King Quinnault’s palace who helped him escape a magically sealed dungeon.

  “What queen?” Rollett turned his piercing gaze on her.

  “You haven’t heard that King Quinnault married the Princess of Terrania,” Powwell replied. “We didn’t hear until we got back to Coronnan.”

  “You’ve been back? How? When?” Rollett pulled himself to his knees, using the crossbars of the gate for support.

  In the last glow of witchlight, Yaala saw a deep bruise forming on the left side of Rollett’s face, beginning at the temple. He had to hurt. Any movement would aggravate the pain.

  She also couldn’t help but notice the clean lines of high cheekbones and straight nose above his trimmed beard. An aristocratic face despite traces of a peasant background in his accent. He might have nothing to wear except rags, but he’d kept himself clean and well groomed. Admirable traits in the foul city above them.

  “How did you get out?” Rollett demanded. “You’ve got to get me out of here. I can’t stay here any longer. I’ve got to get out! I have to find a way to free my men.” He shook the gate with all of his strength. The metal remained solidly closed. “I promised. . . .” His quiet words ended in a choke, almost a sob.

  Powwell stared at his fellow magician without answering. Rollett had said nothing about Kalen, only about his men. Long moments of silence stretched between them.