by Stephen Deas
A couple of hours ago it had seemed a reasonable idea. Rider Semian had flown them deeper into the mountains. Sollos guessed they were about fifty miles south-west of their own camp when Semian had started to descend, and then banked in a half-circle around the shore of a lake. The settlement had been obvious enough, and Semian had found a place to land only a mile or so further around the shore. The day was nearly done, but the distance was short, and Sollos had been confident that they'd easily reach the settlement before nightfall.
Then they'd hit the mud.
'What we need are some boards,' grumbled Kemir. 'A pair of long wide boards. Our own mobile path. With a couple of eyes bolted into them to thread a bit of rope through so you can pull them back up out of the mud again. Do you remember that?'
'Aye. Going back a bit, though.'
'Yes. Being out here does that. I can't wait to get out of these shitty mountains. I really don't know why you were so keen to come back here.'
Sollos shrugged. In a way, it went against his own better judgement as well,
'Not that it matters now, I suppose.'
They trudged on. The sun sank lower, the sky darkened, and the mud didn't get any better. The settlement couldn't have been more than a quarter of a mile away. Sollos's legs were starting to burn with the exertion.
'My boot's stuck. Can I hate you yet?'
Sollos only half heard Kemir's complaint. He stopped. He had the distinct feeling he was being watched.
'Oh…' Among the trees, he saw a slight movement. Something was watching him. A snapper. Very slowly Sollos slipped the dragonbone bow off his shoulder. He began to string it.
The snapper advanced slowly. One of its feet sank into the mud. It took a step back and returned to watching.
'Do you-'
'I see it,' muttered Kemir. 'I was just thinking that the one good thing about this mud was that nothing big enough to eat us would be as daft as we are and try to walk through it.'
'It's on firm ground over there.'
'Oh good. Let's walk towards the half-ton man-eating ravening beast then.'
The snapper stepped into the mud again. This time it didn't withdraw. Instead it took another step, and then another. Sollos looked about, but trying to run away wasn't going to work. Most people faced with a snapper simply ended up eaten. The ones who survived usually did so by climbing a tree and managing not to starve to death before the snappers got bored.
Still, Sollos had a bow powerful enough to take down a dragon-knight. So if he hit the snapper in the right place… Except it was going to charge, any second, and his bow still wasn't strung. His hands slipped towards his waist, and to the two long knives he carried there. Waste of time really, facing a snapper with anything short of a lance. He could forget about his armour too. A snapper could bite through anything short of steel plate, and its back claws were worse. Even so, he couldn't bring himself to simply roll over and die. There was always a chance. He could always get lucky…
They hunt in packs, remember.
The mud would slow it down, though. From moving like lightning to merely very, very fast…
Shit. I'm going to die.
The snapper opened its jaws and charged, and time seemed to slow. Even through the mud, Sollos felt the ground shake with its each step. He dropped the bow and pulled out his knives. It was coming for him. For a split second he seemed completely unable to move.
At the last possible moment, his arms and legs finally remembered what they were for. He didn't bother trying to step out of the way, but let himself fall sideways, out of the monster's path. As he moved, he twisted. One knife jabbed straight at the snapper's face, trying to distract it. The other arced in a vicious backhand towards where he hoped the creature's throat would be.
All completely wasted. Maybe if it hadn't been for the mud…
The first knife missed. The second hit something and was wrenched out of Sollos's hand, and then the snapper smashed into him, the sheer force ripping him out of the mud and tossing him into the air. Teeth tore at his shoulder. There was a sharp pain from one of his ankles, and then he landed on his back, hard enough to knock the breath out of his lungs. The snapper was flying towards him, all teeth and claws. And yet there was something not quite right about it…
He thrust the knife up towards the monster with both hands and closed his eyes. The snapper fell onto him, jaws gaping. He felt a searing flash of pain, and then everything went mercifully black.
He was in a pool, deep in a cave, far beneath the Worldspine. In one of the secret places that only the Outsiders knew. The water was icy cold. The darkness was absolute and the silence immense. He was alone. He was alone because this was what his clan did when a boy became a man. Except his clan was gone, and he was more alone than anyone had ever been. Only him and Kemir…
Something snatched his leg. He didn't feel it coming, and it dragged him down so fast that he didn 't even have time to breathe. He vanished with barely a ripple and sank like a stone. The water became colder and colder until it began to burn, and then the darkness blossomed into light, and the water wasn't water, but white hot fire, stripping his flesh and searing his bones to ash, and there was a face, the face of a dragon.
Something slammed into him. He opened his eyes and the world and the pain came flooding in. He was lying on a damp dirt floor. Everything hurt. His cheek was pressed into the toe of someone's boot.
'Morning,' said a voice that was both too loud and too far away. His head hurt. He started to retch, but that sent such spasms of pain through his ribs that he stopped. He'd seen someone once, in Queen Shezira's eyrie, caught by the idle swish of a dragon's tail. They'd flown about a hundred feet through the air and they hadn't got up again. If they had, Sollos thought, this is how they'd have felt.
Unless…
What happened when you died? He remembered the snapper well enough, so that had to be what had happened. The dragon-priests said that everyone went to the great dragon in the sky to be forged into new souls in the great cosmic fire. But the dragon-priests were mad.
'Are you going to lie there all day?'
'Kemir?' He tried to move. Bad idea. 'The snapper…'
'Got an arrow through its head. And so did its friend.'
'This really hurts.' For a moment Sollos had the almost overwhelming urge to get up and look himself over, just to make sure there were no bits missing. One bite was all it took to lose an arm or a leg, after all.
Even the thought of moving triggered fresh spasms of pain. 'My ribs…'
'Best I could tell there's nothing broken. Nasty wound on your shoulder. That'll need seeing to. The rest of you looks all right. You took a mighty thump when that thing crashed into you, though. You're probably bruised all over. Lucky it didn't land on top of you.'
'It did. Didn't it?'
'Half and half. It sort of bounced off you and ended up lying to one side. Otherwise only the ancestors know how I'd have pulled you out of that mud. Bloody stuff.'
Very slowly, Sollos rolled onto his back. He started to take a deep breath and then quickly thought better of it. 'My head hurts. Got any water?' He frowned. Instinctively, his hands reached for his knives, if only to make sure they were still there. They weren't. 'Where are we?'
'We're in the Outsider settlement, my friend. Home sweet home.'
'Where are my knives?'
'All right. We're prisoners in the Outsider settlement. That would be more accurate.'
Sollos blinked. Carefully, he looked around. Walls made of ill-fitted planks of wood surrounded him. Soft sunlight filtered in through the cracks. 'Prisoners? Why?'
Kemir shuffled his feet. 'There were… words.'
'What did you say?'
'Oh, nothing to get so upset about. I blundered into the place in the small hours of the morning, which probably didn't help, and since I had you slung over my back, I wasn't in much of a position to argue. And they asked if we had anything to do with the dragon they'd seen earlier, and I said yes, and
they asked if the dragon-men were going to come back and burn the place, and so I said yes, probably, since that's what they usually do, either that or the rider was just scouting for a good place to buy dried fish, which, let's face it, was about the only thing this lot have to trade. They didn't take that too well.'
Sollos rolled his eyes. He could do that, he discovered, without anything hurting.
'Don't get all crotchety! Like I said, it was the middle of the night and I woke them all up, so they were pretty grumpy. All right, I might have shouted at them at bit as well, but I'd been carrying you through that lucking mud for hours. I'd lost count of how many times I fell over and I'd had enough. Bloody stuff was bad enough when it was just me.'
'All right, all right.' Sollos forced himself to ignore the pain. He took a deep breath, sat up and then stood. And nearly fell down again.
Kemir caught him.
'Shit! You didn't tell me I'd broken my ankle.'
'Really?' Kemir bent down. 'I didn't spot that. Let me have a look.'
'No! Don't…' He hopped back and forth, trying to keep his balance. 'Ow!'
'That's not broken. That's just a sprain.'
'How do you know? Ow! Stop that!'
'See. No grating bones. Strap that up and you'll be fine. Well, maybe in a couple of days.'
Standing on one leg wasn't working out. Sollos tried sitting down, but then his ribs shrieked at him. He ended up flat out across the floor, back where he'd started. 'So we found the settlement, and now we're stuck here.'
'That's it.' Kemir shrugged. He gave the walls a good shake. The hut seemed ready to fall apart. 'Not exactly stuck. We can leave whenever we want, and I doubt they'd stop us either. Of course, with no bows, no knives, no armour and you being in the state you're in, we wouldn't get very far. Not that we'd know which way to go in the first place.'
'That's fantastic, Kemir. Thank you.'
Kemir snorted. 'Better than being eaten by snappers, I thought.'
'One way to look at it, I suppose.'
'Not as dull as picking our arses back in the valley with those stuck-up knights, either.'
'Since you put it like that.'
Kemir lay on the floor next to Sollos. Together, they stared up at the ceiling. 'I did pick up one thing while we were all busy shouting at each other.'
'What's that?'
'Rider Semian wasn't the first dragon they've seen in these parts lately.'
'Really?'
'Could be they've seen another. Could be it was white.'
'Could be they want to give us our stuff back and then show us where it is?'
'Could be they don't.'
For a long time they lay in silence, looking up at the thatch of reeds.
'Lot of spiders up there,' said Kemir after a while. 'You know, we could-'
'No.'
'But there's always-'
'Certainly not!'
'Right.'
Sollos could hear men talking outside. Mostly they were the loud confident voices of people going about their normal business, but he could hear whispers too, much closer. Eavesdroppers. He knew exactly what Kemir was thinking, but that was a last resort, something to be kept to themselves until they truly needed it. When they were tying him to a stake and lighting the pyre around his ankles, then he might tell them about the dead dragon.
17
Bellepheros
Bellepheros, grand master alchemist, bowed low. Prince Jehal sat on King Tyan's throne. Queen Zafir was to one side of him and Queen Shezira to the other, and then King Narghon and King Silvallan. Both of Queen Shezira's daughters were there, and Bellepheros counted at least a dozen other princes and princesses, not to mention almost every lord or lady of any significance within King Tyan's realm. All here for the wedding.
And this is what passes for a discreet audience?
Strictly, Bellepheros answered only to the Speaker of the Realms. Strictly, no one in this room had any power over him. Strictly…
'Your Holinesses.' He bowed to each king and queen in turn. 'Your Highnesses.' Now to the princes and princesses. 'I have been charged by the Speaker of the Realms to conduct my sacred duty. I have completed this charge, and now it is my duty to report to you, Your Highness,' another bow, this time for Jehal, 'on what I have found.'
Prince Jehal smiled and looked bored. 'We're all gagging to hear it, Master Bellepheros. Tell me first, though, so that we all might hear it – have you had every cooperation from my eyrie-master?'
Bellepheros bowed again. 'Yes, Your Highness. Every cooperation.'
'Have you been able to question every one of the men who serve him?'
'Yes, Your Highness.'
'Has anyone been missed? Has there been anyone you've sought and not found?'
'No, Your Highness.'
'And what of Queen Zafir's men? Her Holiness has remained here as our guest since her mother's death. She has not permitted a single one of her riders, her keepers or any of her men or dragons to return to her own eyrie. Has their cooperation also been complete? Have you been able to question every one of the men who serve her too?'
'Yes, Your Highness.'
Prince Jehal clasped his hands in front of him and leaned forward. 'So in short, Master Bellepheros, you have left no stone unturned, and no obstacle has been placed in your way?'
'The only people I have not questioned under the smoke are yourself and your eyrie-master.'
Jehal nodded. 'Those of royal blood. But you have questioned us yourself, without the smoke, and you have found nothing to contradict what we have told you.'
'That is the case, Your Highness.' Inside, Bellepheros felt the first pangs of unease. Jehal was backing him into a corner.
'So then. To your findings. The speaker sent you here because he believed that Queen Aliphera's death could not have been an accident. Was it?'
Bellepheros smiled. 'Now that I cannot say, Your Highness, for that is not what the speaker charged me to learn. My sacred charge here was to determine whether any other man or woman had a hand in her death.'
'There's a difference?'
'A subtle one, Your Highness. And I shall report to the speaker that Queen Aliphera harnessed and loaded her dragon herself on the day that she died. All her fixings and fastenings were checked by one of her own Scales. I have questioned that man myself under the truth-smoke, and he is innocent of any wrongdoing. I am convinced that no one tampered with Queen Aliphera's mount before she left. Indeed, it seems that the late queen was unusually involved in seeing to her dragon herself on that particular day.'
'Did someone kill her or not?' growled Prince Jehal.
'It is a conundrum, Your Highness. I have every reason to think that Queen Aliphera left Clifftop with her harness fully secured. If there was an accident or, for that matter, any malice, it did not originate within your eyrie, Your Highness. I assure you, I will make this very plain to the speaker. Also, there is no possibility that Queen Aliphera was attacked while in the air. The evidence is absolute on this. Her harness was not cut or torn or burned. It was simply undone.'
Jehal cocked his head. 'You haven't actually answered my question, Master Bellepheros. Did someone kill her?'
Bellepheros shrugged. 'I cannot say, one way or the other. No one saw her fall. She had sent her riders away. It is not my place to speculate as to why she would do such a thing, or what she was doing when she fell.' He'd given the truth-smoke to almost every man and woman in Clifftop and found out nothing, except that the queen had insisted on preparing her mount herself. He looked around the room, looking for clues in the faces of the assembled dragon-kings and -queens. Still nothing. Nothing at all. He sighed, and bowed again, this time to Queen Zafir. 'I am sorry, Your Holiness.'
Queen Zafir gave him a curt nod.
Prince Jehal was looking annoyed.
'So you will not say whether this was murder, or that it was an accident. So in fact you say nothing at all, and you have not discharged the duty placed upon you by our speaker despit
e every possible assistance.'
Bellepheros bowed deeply. 'My apologies, Your Highness.' Understandable, he supposed, that Prince Jehal wanted this to be over, for him to stand up and say it had been an accident. It would be the easy thing too, and yet he couldn't quite bring himself to do it. Call me a perfectionist, but something is not quite as it should be. 'If the speaker is not satisfied and demands an opinion that I cannot substantiate, Your Highness, I will say that Queen Aliphera took her own life.'
Queen Zafir almost spat at him. 'And why would she do that?'
Bellepheros bowed again. 'I cannot say. What I can say is that the actions that Queen Aliphera took when leaving Clifftop lead me to suspect she took something with her and that she intended no one to know of it.' He glanced at Prince Jehal. 'Many riders took to the sky that day. Even your eyrie master, Your Highness, and eyrie masters, in my experience, do not leave their eyries when they have visitors. Not without a pressing reason. Eyrie-Master Lord Meteroa flew that day, and when he returned, he also took great pains to conceal something. One might speculate that Queen Aliphera meant to meet with someone in absolute secrecy, and that she took with her something of great value.'
Jehal sneered at him. 'And what might that have been, Grand Master Alchemist?'
'I cannot even speculate, Your Highness.'
'Then have a care with what you imply, alchemist. Trysts? Secret meetings? Suicide? You will find yourself suggesting that my uncle and Queen Aliphera were lovers next.' Which drew a laugh from some of the less civilised, since it was well understood that eyrie-master Lord Meteroa's preferences lay firmly elsewhere. Jehal waved him away, and Bellepheros was glad to go.
Although for now he couldn't go very far. Jehal's wedding was only days away, and the ritual litany of feasts and games and extravagance was already well under way. Bellepheros would have much preferred to disappear to Clifftop among the dragons, or else hire himself a carriage and get back to his laboratories in the Adamantine Palace. But he was grand master, and that meant that Prince Jehal had to invite him or risk being rude. Which meant he had to accept, lest he cause any offence. He had exactly long enough to change from one set of clothes into another, and then he was back among the same kings and queens and princes and princesses as before, only now they were in a completely different part of the palace and dancing. No one paid him any attention now, which suited him well enough. He would wait, he decided, until he could disengage and retire. Tomorrow, he would hire that carriage to take him back to the Adamantine Palace. He wasn't entirely sure whether he was invited to stay for the wedding or not, but he could always cite his overriding duty to the speaker.