Dragon Weather

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  It was almost certainly stolen, Black thought—the woman’s cloak was ancient, stained and ragged, and what he could see of the dress beneath was no better. This woman could hardly have come by so fine an item honestly. It was probably a family heirloom she had snatched from an unguarded room somewhere.

  Still, it was obsidian, and perhaps she could be convinced to say where she had stolen it. He and Arlian had looked at two dozen pieces already, brought to the door by jewelers, merchants, and people of less obvious employment, and had noted down half a dozen names for further investigation; one more would do no harm, and chasing the poor creature back out into the rain seemed unnecessarily cruel.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let me get you something to eat, and you can sit by the fire while I see if Lord Obsidian’s jeweler is available.”

  He settled her on a stool beside the kitchen hearth, with a heel of bread and a cup of tea to dunk it in—he hadn’t gotten a look at her teeth, but they were probably in bad shape.

  If she opened the door before he got back and let in a horde of thieves, it would serve him right for being too soft-hearted, Black thought as he hastened up the stairs to fetch Arlian. If the palace had had a full-time staff in place he would have put a guard on her, but so far only he, Arlian, and the six Aritheians who had made the long journey to Manfort slept there; for now the locally hired servants all worked days, and returned to their homes at night. That made it easier to maintain the fiction that Lord Obsidian had not yet arrived.

  Black looked forward to the day after the grand gala—once that was over and done with he could hire a proper household staff.

  A few minutes later, when Black and Arlian returned to the kitchen, the woman was still there, huddled on her stool, her cloak steaming in the warmth of the fire. Black hurried past her to check on the postern, and found the door still securely barred.

  “Let me see the brooch,” Arlian said, holding out his hand. He wore coachman’s livery in black piped with white—the colors he had chosen for himself, representing the black of obsidian and the white of justice. He doubted this woman would recognize his attire as inappropriate for a jeweler.

  She set down her empty teacup and fished out the brooch. “I … It’s all we have left,” the woman said as she held it out. “It was my betrothal gift.”

  Black was just reentering the kitchen when Arlian accepted the brooch and got his first good look at it. Black saw the young lord’s jaw drop, his eyes snap wide open; he saw Arlian’s body tense, his back arching as if he had been struck.

  “Sorcery!” Black said, his sword in his hand; suddenly he was at the woman’s side, the blade at her throat.

  “No!” Arlian said, holding up a hand. “No—no, I’m fine.” His voice was rough; he blinked away tears.

  “Then what…”

  “The brooch,” Arlian said, holding it up. The gold sparkled redly in the firelight.

  Black did not lower his sword, but kept it at the woman’s throat, his left hand on the back of her neck. He could feel that she was rigid with terror. “What about it?” he demanded.

  “It’s my mother’s,” Arlian said.

  The woman gasped, then let out a low, sobbing moan.

  Black was not yet entirely convinced there was no sorcery involved; his hands did not move. “You’re certain of that?” he asked.

  “See for yourself,” Arlian said, turning the bauble over and peeling away the velvet backing.

  “Don’t…!” the woman said, starting to snatch at the brooch—but Black’s sword held her in place.

  Arlian held up the golden surface thus revealed and pointed at an inscription. “It’s hard to read, with the glue on it,” he said, “so look for yourself, and tell me whether it says, ‘To Sharbeth, with all my love.’” He looked at the woman. “Sharbeth was my mother.”

  “He st … but…”

  Black released his hold on the woman’s neck and accepted the brooch. He had to squint to make out any of the inscription, as it was clogged not just with glue but with dirt and ash and bits of black velvet, but the lengths of the words were right, and the longest word did look like “Sharbeth.”

  “So it’s your mother’s brooch,” Black said. “It would seem I may have been overly pessimistic regarding your plans—but now what?”

  “Where did you get it?” Arlian demanded, staring the woman in the eye.

  She turned an imploring gaze on Black. “The … the sword,” she said.

  “Sheathe it,” Arlian said.

  Black frowned, but obeyed. It would seem no sorcery was involved after all, and in that case two strong men should be able to handle one beggar woman. He slid the blade into its sheath, but kept his hand on the hilt.

  “Now,” Arlian said, stepping forward and stooping to look the woman in the eye, “where did you get that brooch?”

  “My husband,” she said. “It was my betrothal gift. We … we didn’t know it was stolen, I swear! The velvet was … it was there…”

  “Who is your husband?” Arlian demanded. “Where is he? Still alive?”

  “He … he’s sick. Very sick. That’s why I needed money. He didn’t want … all these years…” She stared at the brooch in Arlian’s hand.

  “What’s your husband’s name?” Arlian demanded. “Where is he?”

  “His name is Yorvalin, but everyone calls him Cover,” she said. “He’s in our room on Broom Street.”

  “Cover?” Arlian straightened, and he and Black stared at each other over the woman’s head.

  “It can’t be that easy,” Black said.

  “I wouldn’t have thought so,” Arlian agreed, “but sometimes Fate is kind, as I know better than almost anyone.”

  “What are you talking about?” the woman asked, looking from one man to the other. “What is easy?”

  “What’s your name?” Arlian asked.

  “I’m … I’m called Stammer,” she said, flushing.

  “Of course,” Arlian said, with audible distaste. Sometimes he didn’t think much of the cognomens people bestowed upon one another. “Well, Stammer,” he said, looking down at her, “I want to talk to your husband.”

  She hesitated, clearly wishing she hadn’t said as much as she already had. “You won’t hurt him?”

  Arlian sighed. “I can’t promise that,” he said.

  “I won’t … then I won’t take you.”

  Black raised his sword hilt an inch or two from the scabbard, but Arlian gestured for him to put it back.

  “Stammer,” he said, kneeling and looking up into her eyes, “do you know just how bad your position is? You’ve come here uninvited and tried to sell me stolen merchandise. From the look of you it’s obvious you have no money, no family, no patron—and here you are in Lord Obsidian’s home, arguing with his staff. Black could kill you, and claim he caught you stealing from us, and no one would ever doubt it. We could call a slaver in and sell you—and you’re still young and pretty enough that there’s no telling where you’d wind up as a slave. Now, we don’t want to do anything like that—we don’t want to harm you at all—but we do want to find your husband. You’ve already said he’s in your room on Broom Street—we’ll find him eventually, no matter what you do. You can save us the trouble of searching. And it’s your home—if we released you we would follow you, and sooner or later, wouldn’t you go back to your husband?” He fished in his pocket and pulled out a gold ducat. “I’ll pay you for your trouble, if you like—or not, if you think that would be too much like selling him.”

  She stared down at the coin. “I … I’ll sell you the brooch,” she said.

  “The brooch is mine by right,” Arlian said coldly. “It’s not yours to sell. Your services as a guide, though, are your own.”

  She looked from Arlian to Black, but found no support there—Black’s expression showed only detached interest, Arlian’s intense determination.

  “Give me the money,” she said, snatching the gleaming coin.

  Arlian let her tak
e it.

  “Now take us to Cover,” he said.

  Stammer nodded. She got to her feet, and Arlian straightened up to follow.

  Black raised a hand to halt him. “It’s raining,” he said. “Perhaps you should change your clothes, or at least put on a hat.”

  Arlian looked down at himself, and agreed.

  An hour later Arlian saw the first of the intended targets of his revenge, stretched out before him in the wretched dwelling he now inhabited, close up under the roof of a crumbling, narrow tenement.

  There was no bed; Cover lay on a pile of rags on the bare planks that served as a floor. The entire room had clearly been improvised—the planks lay loose across the tie beams, creating a little wooden island seven feet above the attic’s true floor, accessible only by a rickety ladder. There were no windows or other means of ventilation, and the air was chokingly thick, stifling hot, and horribly still, full of the scents of wood and mildew and sweat. Light came from a single candle on a table below, and from the lantern Black held.

  Most of the family that lived in the attic proper watched silently as Arlian, now clad in nondescript traveling garb rather than his coachman’s livery, climbed up to Cover’s niche, his hat in one hand; Black, in his customary leather and carrying a drawn sword in his right hand with the lantern in his left, stood guard at the foot of the ladder. Stammer watched nervously from one side.

  The mother of the attic family sat in one corner with her youngest at her breast, ignoring the entire affair, and two of the other children were too busy squabbling to pay attention, but Arlian still had half a dozen pairs of eyes focused on him. In consequence he moved more slowly, and with greater caution, than he might otherwise have. He was eager, very eager, to see whether this was in fact the Cover he had met all those years ago in the ruins, the man who had lifted him up out of the cellar where Arlian’s grandfather had lain dead.

  The man on the rag pile did not look at Arlian as he rose into view—or at anything else. He lay on his back, his eyes closed, his breath rasping feebly. His skin was mottled with patches of unhealthy red, plainly visible even in the dim, uneven light.

  Arlian swung himself off the ladder, stooping under the rafters, and stepped across the platform so that he leaned over the sick man.

  “Cover,” Arlian said.

  The man licked his lips, but otherwise did not move.

  “Look at me, Cover,” Arlian demanded.

  The sunken eyes opened, and the head turned, and Arlian knew that this was, indeed, the same man. He had lost weight, a great deal of weight—his flesh was stretched tight over his bones, and Arlian could count his ribs through the filthy, frayed shirt that covered his chest—but it was Cover.

  Despite the heat of the stuffy attic, Arlian shivered. For years he had intended to punish this man for his crimes, for robbing the innocent dead of the village on the Smoking Mountain and for allowing Lord Dragon to sell Arlian into slavery—but what could he do to punish this pitiful creature who lay before him?

  “How did you come to this?” Arlian asked. “When last I saw you you were well and strong, working for Lord Dragon.”

  Cover stared at him for a long moment, then spoke. “It’s you?” he asked, his voice faint and breathy. “The boy from the cellar?”

  “You recognize me?” Arlian asked, startled.

  “Dreamed of you,” Cover said. “I’m so sorry.”

  Arlian stared at him silently. He had not expected contrition. And the dreams … were they simply reflections of Cover’s own concerns, or did the man have the gift of prophecy? After his experiences in Arithei Arlian no longer doubted that some dreams were more than just the sleeping mind at play.

  Had someone sent the dreams?

  Had Cover really dreamed of him at all? Perhaps the man was delirious.

  “How did you find me?” Cover asked after a moment, when Arlian still had not spoken.

  “Your wife tried to sell me my mother’s brooch,” Arlian replied, forgetting about the dreams.

  “Her brooch? She shouldn’t have done that. I told her she must never sell it. I gave it to her…” He coughed, cutting off his speech.

  “She had nothing else left to sell,” Arlian said.

  “But it wasn’t ours, not really. I never told her, but I knew you’d come for it someday. I gave it to her for our betrothal so she would never part with it.”

  “How could you know I would come?” Arlian demanded, suddenly angry. “Why didn’t you tell her it was stolen?”

  “I couldn’t,” Cover said. “I’m a coward. Couldn’t stop thinking of you, and your village. I wouldn’t work for Lord Dragon after that—that was my first job, and I couldn’t stand it. Saw your face everywhere after that—I knew sooner or later justice would catch up with me, that I’d be punished for what we did.”

  That explained why Cover remembered Arlian so clearly—if he had never again joined in looting or raiding, the one event would stand out.

  “What did you do, then?”

  “I looked for other work—but I didn’t know a trade. And I couldn’t get work from any of the lords after that, once I had told Lord Dragon no—the Dragon Society cast me out, marked me as unclean.”

  “The Dragon Society?”

  “Lord Dragon’s friends. The other lords. They wouldn’t help anyone he frowned upon.”

  “You didn’t beg for forgiveness? You never went back to work for him again?”

  “Couldn’t find him. And I didn’t want to.” Tears began to well up in Cover’s sunken eyes. “I married Stammer, and did what work I could find, but it was never much. We stayed one step ahead of the slavers—and then last year I got sick.”

  “And you never tried to find me, in all those years, to make amends?” Arlian asked. “You never came to the mine to buy me free? You never tried to return the brooch or any of the rest of it?”

  “No,” Cover said weakly. “I didn’t dare. And I needed my share of the money to live on.” He held out a trembling hand. “I’m sorry.”

  Arlian stepped back toward the ladder and did not reach for the hand.

  “So am I,” he said. He gripped the hilt of his sword—but he hesitated, and did not draw the blade.

  He could not punish this man—Cover had already punished himself far more effectively than Arlian could. Killing him would be no worse than letting him live.

  Arlian was wealthy; if he chose he could take Cover in, feed him, give him a home—the illness might well be caused as much by malnutrition as anything else. Furthermore, the Aritheians knew a great deal of magic, and while they said magic could not heal everything, some diseases could be treated with their herbs and amulets. Perhaps they could cure the wasting disease that was eating Cover alive …

  But why should Arlian help? Cover had never done anything to atone for his crimes. He had never sought out Arlian; by his own admission he had never even tried.

  No, Arlian owed Cover nothing—neither vengeance nor succor.

  But that didn’t mean he had no further business here.

  “Are you going to kill me?” Cover asked, interrupting his thoughts.

  “No,” Arlian said. “I am going to leave you here, unharmed—and unaided. I am going to take my mother’s brooch, which is rightfully mine, but there may be something else you can sell me—if not for your own benefit, for your wife’s.”

  “What is it?”

  “I want to find the rest of your party of looters,” Arlian said. “Shamble, and Dagger, and Hide, and Tooth, and Stonehand. And I want to know everything you can tell me about Lord Dragon—is that how he’s generally known?”

  “I can’t … I…”

  “I will pay one ducat for each of your former comrades I locate through your information,” Arlian interrupted. “And I will pay five ducats for Lord Dragon’s true name.”

  “I don’t know his true name!” Cover gasped desperately. “I don’t know where they all are anymore—I haven’t seen any of them in years.”

&nbs
p; “Tell me what you can, then,” Arlian said. “Tell me what you can, and it may be enough.”

  30

  Cover

  Cover had been an eager, if foolish, young man when he hired on with Lord Dragon. The younger son of a farmer of no great wealth, he had sold his birthright to his elder brother and come to Manfort seeking his fortune.

  He had, instead, found taverns and gaming and bad companions—and one good one, the girl Stammer, whom he had befriended when others mocked her.

  But then the money had run low, and his friend and drinking companion Hide had offered him employment with Lord Dragon. He took the job gladly, and he and the others had followed Lord Dragon out of Manfort to the south and west, and up the slopes of the Smoking Mountain.

  The sight of the burned-out ruins and the scattered bodies had changed Cover. The horror of it had settled into his heart. He had looked upon the devastation the dragons had left behind, and at the other looters, and he had realized that his companions were blind to the evil he saw there; they saw only unguarded valuables waiting to be taken.

  When he and the others had pulled Arlian from the cellar, Cover had seen it at first as a sign that they were not simply thieves desecrating the dead—they had saved a boy, they had done something good, something to redeem themselves and to balance what they stole.

  And then Lord Dragon had sold the boy as a slave, and Cover’s hopes of redemption were dashed.

  Later, when they were almost back to Manfort, Lord Dragon had told them he had another job for them, in the east—and Cover had refused. He had demanded his share of the profits and returned to his old haunts in the city.

  At first everything had been fine—but then the others had completed whatever task they had had in the east and come back to Manfort, and word had begun to spread. Cover never learned just what was said, but he found that his credit had been cut off at the taverns, the odd jobs he had done for spending money were no longer offered, and he was not welcome among people who had been his friends. One of those former friends mentioned that Shamble had spoken a few words of warning; others would not give even that much reason.