Dragon Venom (Obsidian Chronicles Book 3)

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  "Only the merest dabbling, Your Grace; I would no more call myself a sorcerer than I would claim I can fly like a bird."

  "Nonetheless, you know more of the southern lands and their magic than any other here. What, then, do you think of the latest news?"

  Arlian blinked, and glanced at Spider, whose expressionless face was no help. "Your Grace, I have not heard the latest news; to what do you refer?"

  "Surely, you know that there have been incursions into the Borderlands?"

  Arlian recalled his conversation with Isein. "I had heard that there were rumors of such, just since my arrival in Manfort," he said carefully.

  "No word of anything like that had reached me in the north. I know no details. Have there been intrusions?"

  "Oh, yes." The Duke looked over the courtiers, and beckoned to one of them. "Come forth, Lord Naran, and tell Obsidian what you told me. Perhaps with his experience in the south he will have a greater appreciation of the fine points."

  Arlian turned.

  Naran was a tall, thin young man clad in fine linen, his face darkened by the sun; he stepped forward and bowed to Arlian and the Duke.

  Arlian returned the bow.

  "I am delighted to meet you, my lord Obsidian," Naran said. "I have heard much about you."

  "The pleasure is mine," Arlian said. "Now, pray, do tell me your news."

  "Of course. You see, I am a caravan master, just returned from what was intended as a trading expedition to the Borderlands—but we accomplished little trade."

  "And why is that?"

  "We arrived in Sweetwater on schedule—I believe you know the town? My partner in this journey, a fellow named Drens, said you had accompanied him there once."

  "I did," Arlian acknowledged.

  "It was our intention to split the caravan at that point; Lord Drens was to proceed to the southwest, perhaps as far as Skok's Falls, while I would make haste to Pon Ashti, in the east. I had some hope of meeting merchants from the southern coasts in the markets of Pon Ashti, you see."

  Arlian struggled to recall the geography of the Borderlands, He knew that Skok's Falls stood atop a gigantic cliff that formed a portion of the southernmost border of the Lands of Man, overlooking wild jungle reportedly inhabited by semi-human creatures, but no true men; adventurers sometimes climbed down into the jungle, at great risk to their own lives, and brought out various exotic goods that could be sold to the caravan merchants at outrageous prices. The merchants could then sell these herbs and creatures for even more outrageous prices once they were north of the Desolation.

  Pon Ashti, on the other hand, was a city-state in the marshy southeast whose relationship with the Lands of Man had long been somewhat vexed. Since it was far enough to the north that magic was weak and easily regulated within its confines, and it was built upon land that had unquestionably been under the dragons' sway during at least a part of die long millennia of their rule, it should by rights have been considered a part of the Lands of Man—but its ruling council had never acknowledged the supremacy of the Duke of Manfort, or indeed any authority higher than itself. The city's location at the head of the Darambar estu-ary made it a center of trade, and every so often one of the present Duke's ancestors had attempted to collect tariffs or taxes on that trade, but never with much result.

  Arlian had never visited either of them. "Yes," he said, "I see."

  "We were in the process of dividing the caravan when word came from the east, with the first refugees—the Blue Mage had claimed Pon Ashti as her own, and attempts to repel her had utterly failed. All the eastern Borderlands were in turmoil as a result, and it appeared that the city had indeed fallen to the wizard's magic."

  "But Pon Ashti is warded," Arlian protested. "The walls are sheathed in iron!"

  "Say rather, the city walls are augmented with iron," Naran corrected. "They had insufficient metal for full sheathing. A strip of black iron every three paces—which had sufficed for these seven centuries, yes. Why that was no longer enough to withstand the Blue Mage, I do not know. I merely tell you what the refugees told us."

  Arlian glanced at the Duke, who was sitting back in his throne with an uneasy smile upon his face, and then at Lord Spider, whose face seemed frozen into immobility, and who had not yet said a word in the entire course of the audience. Clearly, there were political currents here Arlian did not understand; that worried him. He looked back at Naran.

  "Go on," he said.

  12

  The Border Aflame

  The Border Aflame

  Obviously, we could not split the caravan under such circumstances,"

  Naran continued. "We therefore resolved to carry out Drens's original plans, and proceed to the southwest, toward Skok's Falls—though we were not at all certain how far we would go. I do not know whether you are aware of it, Lord Obsidian, but in recent years Skok's Falls has been haunted—nightmares trouble the inhabitants' sleep, there are things glimpsed from the corner of the eye, and any number of odd occur-rences have been reported. Herbs that once could only be found beyond the border now grow in the town's gardens, and unnatural creatures roam the streets. Fewer and fewer merchants dare venture there, and even some of the town's natives have been relocating to more northerly areas for some time now."

  "I had not heard," Arlian said.

  He was not happy to hear it now. He was reminded that the sorcerers he employed to locate openings into the caverns where the dragons slept had remarked on occasion that sorcery was becoming easier, magical energy more plentiful, in recent years; for the most part he had dismissed this as the result of improvement with practice, but had also worried sometimes that it was an inadvertent result of his own heavy importation of Aritheian magic into the Lands of Man. His meager studies in sorcery had taught him that when magic was used the energy did not simply cease to exist; rather, it dissipated into the surrounding air and soil. Hie energy expended by the Aritheian magic had been brought from the plentiful supplies beyond the border, and had presumably been added to the very feeble energies of the Lands of Man, augmenting the power the sorcerers drew on.

  When dissipated over such a large area his imports should not have been sufficient to make a noticeable difference for even the most sensi-tive sorcerer, though, and could certainly not be responsible for events as distant as the Blue Mage's conquest of Pon Ashti, or the haunting of Skok's Falls. Some other factor was surely at work. The sorcerers' words should have warned him long ago.

  Lord Naran continued, "Nonetheless, we set out along the south-western road, and two days from Sweetwater we arrived in Redgate, only to find the town jammed with people driven from their homes. It would seem that the naked, screaming hordes of Tirikindaro had overrun the walled cities of Shenneyd and Talolo. We would have done far better to have brought grain and fruit than the wool and silk and tin that we had—many of these poor folks were starving. We did what we could, and then pressed on.

  "Our next stop beyond Redgate was to have been Sazar, on the border of Shei, but the road was so infested with night-creatures and fire-birds that we altered our plans—and later we heard that the wizards of Shei had annexed Sazar, in any case, and would quite likely have impounded all our goods. Instead we made our way to Galadas, and then Yellowfield.

  "And there we gave up, and turned back."

  "Why?" Arlian asked.

  "Because there we met some of the survivors from farther south."

  Naran took a deep breath, then said, "My lord, Skok's Falls no longer exists. And some of its people, even those who fled, are no longer human. I saw a woman with eyes like a cat's, a boy with gleaming purple scales on his arms..." He shuddered. "The sky in Yellowfield was awash in magic—colors that should not exist flickered across it, and at night it glowed unnaturally, allowing us to see shapes flying overhead that still trouble me."

  "I have seen the sky over Tirikindaro, or the Dreaming Mountains," Arlian said. "You need say no more."

  "The towns between Yellowfield and Skok's Falls
were in chaos,"

  Naran said. "There were riots, battles between those who wanted to flee northward, and those who wanted to stand and fight—and those who had been corrupted by the magical forces from beyond the border."

  "It would seem that all the Borderlands are in chaos," Arlian remarked.

  "Indeed," said the Duke, before Naran could say any more. Arlian turned back to the throne.

  "And I would know, Lord Obsidian, why this should be happening,"

  the Duke continued. "The creatures beyond the border have always sought to intrude upon the Lands of Man, but never before, in all the centuries of recorded history, have they been able to make significant inroads. Why are they doing so now?"

  "I do not know, Your Grace," Arlian said—and in truth, he did not know, but a ghastly suspicion was forming.

  His Aritheian imports were not the only magic in the Lands of Man, after all.

  "You are my expert on magic, Obsidian—have you no idea at all?

  No possibility to suggest?"

  "Alas, Your Grace, I do not. Have you spoken to the Aritheian magicians—Asaf and Tiviesh and Isein? Or Hlur, the ambassador? The people of Arithei live with wild magic as a matter of course, and surely know more about it than I."

  "I have spoken with Hlur and Tiviesh, and with my own sorcerers—

  though decent sorcerers are scarce in Manfort now that the old lords have died or fled."

  "The dragonhearts, you mean."

  "Yes. The lords who have lived long enough to learn sorcery. And three of our best remaining sorcerers accompanied you this past winter—have you brought them back with you?"

  "Alas, Your Grace, I left them in Ethinior for the summer. But there is Lady Rime, here in Manfort. And Lady Flute knows more of sorcerous healing than any other who has lived these past five hundred years."

  "Do you think they might know more than you?"

  "Your Grace, I am a mere child by comparison, not yet forty years old where Rime has lived four hundred!"

  The Duke frowned. "Lady Rime was among my advisors of old, Obsidian, and she abandoned me years ago, retiring to the bosom of her adopted family; I do not especially fancy the idea of going to her asking favors."

  Arlian spread his hands. "Indeed, you must do as you see best, Your Grace; I did not mean to instruct you, but merely to assure you of my own ignorance."

  And in fact, he did not really want the Duke to talk to Rime, or anyone else who might tell him what Arlian guessed to be the reason—not until Arlian had had time to consider the situation.

  He seemed to hear Black's voice in his ears repeating what he had told Arlian long ago, when first they were preparing to join a caravan to the Borderlands. Arlian had been a mere youth, little more than half his present age, but he remembered it well. Black had been telling him what ruled the lands beyond the border.

  "Gods here and there, perhaps, and certainly a few magicians elsewhere, but mostly . . . mostly it's other things. Things that neither men nor dragons conquered."

  Those were the things that were now spreading north, into the Lands of Man, the lands men had taken from the dragons.

  And Black had said, "They're things that couldn't conquer the dragons."

  But now, thanks to Arlian and his compatriots, more than half those dragons were gone, and the survivors, when they were awake, were busily destroying human settlements. Whatever the dragons had been doing to keep out those other things, the wild magic and the creatures from beyond the border, they were apparently doing no longer.

  This made any discussion of avoided ambushes trivial and irrelevant; this could mean the entire nature of the conflict between humanity and the dragons must change.

  "There is a theory that has been put forth, my lord," the Duke said, interrupting Arlian's thoughts. "I said I had spoken to some of the sorcerers and Aritheians, and I have; I did not say they had no answers. They do have theories, and one of them seems to be quite popular."

  Arlian's heart sank. "Oh? And what would that be, Your Grace?"

  "That your slaughter of dragons has weakened the magical defenses of the Lands of Man."

  And there it was, then, out in the open. Arlian realized for the first time that the Duke had said he was impressed by Arlian's success in killing dragons, but he had not said he was pleased; he had called it remarkable, but never said it was good. And Lord Spider, who would ordinarily have congratulated Arlian on his successes, had said nothing at all.

  Arlian upbraided himself for not noticing and correctly interpreting this sooner.

  "In fact, we have a message from Sarkan-Mendoth, from the surviving members of the Dragon Society," the Duke said, gesturing.

  Arlian hardly needed to bother looking; he knew the Duke was indicating the woman in the blue mask as the messenger. "Their letter tells us the same—that the dragons, destructive though they may be, embody the magical essence of all the lands we call ours, and that their mere existence is enough to keep the wizards and monsters beyond the border."

  That made a distressing amount of sense, but Arlian was momentarily distracted from the information by its source. The dragonhearts had sent a representative openly—then were Tiria and Zaner also in the Citadel legitimately? If so, why did Zaner bother with the mask?

  No, those two probably were spies, operating clandestinely while this blue-masked woman served to distract the Duke. She was not a dragonheart, Arlian was sure; the Society would not risk openly sending someone whose mere presence in Manfort carried a possible death sentence. Whoever this woman was, she had not tasted the foul mixture of blood and venom.

  At least, not yet; perhaps running this errand would earn her that false reward.

  "Today we know of catastrophes in the Borderlands," the Duke said. "Pon Ashti and Skok's Falls and who knows where else fallen to wizards, the thing in Tirikindaro expanding, sending its slave-soldiers everywhere . . . it's a disaster, Obsidian. Bad enough that we have been losing hundreds of innocent lives to the dragons every summer—at least we could see an end in sight, and we had your obsidian weapons to defend us. But these things? If they cross the Desolation, will obsidian defend against them?w

  "Cold iron will fend off some of them," Arlian said, without thinking. "Silver is proof against others, and there are certain stones . . . "

  " I don't care!" the Duke bellowed, rising from his chair. "Do you think I want to live the way the Aritheians do, beset by nightmares, every road lined with iron posts to keep back the monsters? Hlur has told me what it was like there, and I will not have that in my lands!"

  Arlian bowed a silent acknowledgment, but the Duke was not finished.

  "And that's just the south," he said. "There is said to be wild magic beyond the western deserts as well, and in the icefields to the north, and beyond the mountains to the northwest—what's to stop all of it from pouring in on us if the dragons are all gone?"

  "I do not know, Your Grace," Arlian said quietly.

  "Much as I hate to say this, Obsidian, we need the dragons. Better those monsters than the things beyond the borders! Unless you can offer an alternative, and prove that it will work, you are not to slay any more dragons! Is that clear?"

  "Utterly, Your Grace." Arlian turned to the blue-masked woman.

  "And will the Dragon Society undertake to arrange a truce in exchange, and ensure that no more innocents are slaughtered this summer?"

  "I am only a messenger, my lord," the woman said. "I am sure they will do what they can, but they are the dragons' servants, not their masters."

  "Do they admit that?" Arlian asked, startled.

  "Perhaps 'partners' would be a better term than 'servants'? I do not think they are slaves, but all who live under their administration recognize that the dragons are more powerful than any humans, and that for the most part the dragonhearts obey the dragons, and not the reverse."

  Arlian decided to withhold further comment; he had his own opinions as to power and humanity, but saw no point in arguing the matter here and
now. He turned back to the Duke.

  "Your Grace, you have my word that I will not hunt down any more of our draconic enemies without your permission until we have some solution to the situation beyond the Desolation. I trust I may be permitted to defend against any that emerge from their lairs, however? That I may continue to fortify the cities and towns of your realm against them?"

  The Duke glanced at the messenger, then at Lord Spider, and

  finally Spider spoke. "I think that should be acceptable," he said. "The dragons must restrain themselves if we are to put an end to these invasions in the south."

  "Then that will do," the Duke said. His expression softened. "Lord Obsidian, I know you hate the dragons for what they did to your family and your home; I know you hoped to exterminate them entirely. This must be hard for you to accept—but there are worse things than dragons. We have all lived with the dragons all our lives; we can live with them longer. You had no way of knowing what would happen."

  "Thank you, Your Grace," Arlian said. He was unsure what he was thanking the Duke for, but could think of no better reply.

  "You have fought hard for many years; go home and rest, and let the rest of us arrange matters." He waved in dismissal.

  Arlian bowed; the audience was clearly at an end. Anything else he might want to discuss with the Duke—and with the altered circumstances, Arlian was no longer sure what that might be—would have to wait. He retreated quickly, and left the room.

  He hesitated in the corridor, debating whether to go about any other business while he was in the Citadel, but decided he was in no mood to deal with the mundane concerns of the city's warlord.

  Besides, he told himself, he had arranged to meet with Tiria and Zaner. He had thought that was to be a duel of wits, but now it appeared more likely to be merely settling the terms of his surrender.

  He already regretted making his promise to the Duke; he still wanted to hunt down and kill the three dragons that had destroyed his home on the Smoking Mountain when he was a boy. Sparing the others in exchange for their services in magically defending the borders and an agreement not to raid undefended villages was hard, but perhaps something he could learn to live with; sparing the monster that had killed his parents, his grandfather, and his brother . . .