EXILED Defenders of Ar

by Jack Lovejoy

  eventhorizonpg.com

  The Blue Dragon

  A POTBOY at the Blue Dragon, the most popular inn in all Kazerclawm, saw many strange folk come and go, and this year’s festival had attracted the strangest young Branwe had ever seen. Outlandish in fur and feature, with accents so gutteral that he could hardly understand them, some appeared to him downright sinister. It would be a relief to get away from their probing questions for a while, and he hung up his apron and hurried from the kitchen.

  The sprawling three-floored structure was comfortable rather than elegant. It stood just inside the Watersmeet Gate, and never closed its doors. Certainly the dragon sign over its front entrance looked more inviting than the species ever did in the wild. The walled courtyard behind was disposed among a congeries of stables, cisterns, curing sheds, and kitchen gardens. Normally the old inn lodged a transient clientele of merchants and travelers, itinerant craftsmrem, artists, wandering scholars, and some shy and guarded people of no evident means or profession, suspected of being magicians. It was now packed to the very storerooms with festival tourists, although the rankers from the local garrison—who sauntered in nightly to drink and dance and, sometimes, brawl—always seemed to find room for themselves.

  There was plenty of room at the moment. Early afternoon was usually a slack period, even at festival time, and a pair of raddled old scullery wenches, once dancers at this very inn, toiled with dust rags, brooms, mops, brushes, and pails; chairs were stacked on tables, and all but one of the waiters idle. Out on the dance floor a lone soldier was practicing for a forthcoming duel, under the critical eyes of his seconds.

  Branwe watched for a moment, then shrugged. His own martial dance was already superior both in technique and execution.

  The walls were a fantastic array of scenes, painted over the years in various styles with varying degrees of skill, by itinerant artists unable to settle their tabs by any other means. A full generation had passed since one such artist had framed the mirror behind the bar with ornamental gemstones. Common crystal, really, but so artfully cut and set, in a glittering rainbow of colors, that it was still the pride of the Blue Dragon. Nobody dared polish it but old Mamre herself, the innkeeper’s wife.

  Branwe found her polishing it now, with the silken cloth she used for no other purpose.

  “If you don’t need me for anything special,” he said, “I’ll be off to school. It’s the last afternoon class before festival recess, and Master Hoobel wants me there as early as possible.”

  “Oh, that Hoobel.” Mamre shook her head, half amused, half exasperated. “Nobody has more schooling, or knows less about schoolkits. No doubt he wants help with his class today,” she added drily.

  “The young scamps learn more tricks than lessons, from all I hear,” commented her husband Grujekh, a sleek little mrem with shifty eyes, polishing a set of wine goblets down the bar. “Everybody needs all the help he can get at festival time.”

  This last he muttered as if talking to himself. That a common potboy should learn to read and write had always seemed to him a waste of good time. But so long as the arrangement did not also waste his good money, he did not press the argument. His wife could show her claws, when she chose.

  “Run along, lad,” she said. “You worked hard this morning, and we’re sure to have another big crowd here when you get back. I just hope they’re a handsomer lot than the gang we had in here last night. Never saw such mean-looking folk.”

  “They all paid their tabs,” said her husband, continuing to polish the goblets, “so I don’t know what you’re complaining about. The way some of’ em looked at your mirror, I thought they wanted to buy it.” He chuckled.

  “You know it’s not for sale, at any price,” she bridled.

  “Nobody who knows the Blue Dragon would insult me with such an offer. Although it’s natural they should admire it, I suppose. Probably never saw anything so fine, in whatever outlandish corner of the world they’re from. I could hardly understand them, the way they talked.”

  “You had no trouble understanding their money though, did you?” Grujekh winked cynically.

  Mamre glared at him and started to reply, but then just let the matter drop. It was years too late for her to expect her husband to change his stingy, grasping ways.

  “Get all the schooling you can while you have the chance, lad,” she said, returning to Branwe. “It will be important to you someday.”

  “Just don’t dawdle on the way back,” Grujekh warned him.

  “That’s important to you right now.”

  The snow-capped peak of the Kazerclaw glistened like opal, or at least like one of the crystals in the frame of Mamre’s prize mirror, in the afternoon sun. It dominated the barrier mountains, just as the walled city of Kazerclawm at its foot dominated the passage from the eastern deserts. Its one scalable slope was restricted to citizens, and the Sacred Gate always well guarded. Not in all his years as a potboy at the Blue Dragon—all his life, in fact, for he knew no other—had Branwe been able to penetrate the mystery he knew overhung the towering peak. Mamre had merely shrugged when he asked about it, while her husband returned the same answer he had for all such questions: “Don’t meddle where it’s none of your business.” Only a creature with wings could reach the heights from any other direction.

  Not that Branwe had any passionate interest in mountains.

  It was just that he was beginning to question things he had always taken for granted, for every day the familiar seemed to him stranger and more mysterious. He was certain the Kazerclaw was more than mere rock and snow, just as he knew there was surely more to life than kitchen drudgery and mopping up after sick revelers. The female dancers at the Blue Dragon, this last year or so, rarely missed the chance to rub themselves against him whenever he passed. They had schooled him in subjects never taught by Master Hoobel although his first excitement was soon tempered by the realization that they were just as wanton with any presentable male. Especially the rankers from the garrison on payday.

  Until accepting the post as monitor in Master Hoobel’s classroom, in exchange for lessons, the odd scraps he had picked up from these old soldiers—sometimes teasing him, sometimes in drunken earnest—had been his only schooling. He had also picked up a cracked sword from the armory trash barrel, and practiced sword drills and military dances whenever he had spare time. Grujekh saw to it that he had precious little of this, and he knew that his martial skills thus far were barely those of a raw garrison recruit, much less a true warrior. But even a humble potboy can dream....

  Never had the streets seemed so colorful. He had heard rankers grumble over their cups that the whole city was being turned into a carnival, instead of the first bastion of the eastern marchlands, and that revenues badly needed to repair walls and siege engines were being diverted by the frivolous young governor—a recent appointment of the even more frivolous young King of Ar—to ornament his own palace.

  Kazerclawm was certainly a carnival today, and he paused to watch a village troupe in traditional costumes, rehearsing a traditional dance for the festival competition. Only the grandest villages or city-states could afford to reserve a public dance pavilion for their rehearsals; nor were their glittery costumes so obviously homemade. But this small troupe was wonderfully enthusiastic, and he admired their agile leaps and whirls for a few minutes, before at last squeezing through the crowd gathered around them.

  A stone dragon, its left ear battered by neighborhood urchins, marked the next crossing. Significantly, it was usually to the left that he turned, toward one of the most battered quarters in the city. Mamre had never told him how she first became acquainted with the old
wizard who lived there, but she always saw to it that Branwe had enough time to run errands for him. Lately, he had also helped with household chores.

  The old mrem was now gravely ill, perhaps dying. Why he was known only as the Sentinel was a mystery—he had dwelt in Kazerclawm longer than Branwe himself had been alive—but there was nothing mysterious about his choice of backstreet lodgings. Prudence more than poverty dictated that he live as obscurely as possible, although he was certainly poor. Magicians were always distrusted, sometimes feared, even hated. Twice in his lifetime Branwe had seen magicians stoned by hostile mobs. He had to be cautious himself at times.

  Branwe’s peculiar gray-blue coloring was rarely seen in this part of the land, and never in such unblemished purity. Few wondered about a mere potboy at an inn. Who knew his father? Or even his mother? Who really cared? Travelers came and went; the dancing girls at the Blue Dragon were notoriously promiscuous. That might explain any color of fur. Mamre had told him only that he had been found in a closet one morning. He was not the first kit so abandoned at the Blue Dragon; but in his case she had decided to raise him, being childless herself.

  Not until Srana came to tend her ailing grandfather had he ever been sensitive about his lowly station. She was his own age, but seemed so far above him in every way that he was always shy in her presence—a feeling he experienced with no other female. In fact, those he courted at the Blue Dragon—or who courted him—were both charmed and amused by his very boldness with them. With Srana it was different. Her beauty and education, her poise and sensibility, were beyond anything he had ever known before; but she also brought with her the mystique of the White Dancers, whose moral authority was preeminent throughout the land.

  It was mostly because of her that he had accepted the post of classroom monitor with Master Hoobel. The oddments of learning he thus gained might be a shallow reflection of true education, but he felt somehow less like a common menial now, when he ran errands for her grandfather, or helped with some heavy chore. He knew that servant’s wages would be a burden for them and accepted only the loan of books as recompense, although he said publicly that he was well paid for his labors—or he wouldn’t have done them. This claim allayed suspicions about why he visited the house of a magician so often.

  Unconsciously, the old wizard’s journeyman, Nizzam, also allayed neighborhood suspicions about the household. A tyro who had pompously convinced himself that he was a great wizard, his self-centered posturing and conceit made him such a figure of fun among the neighbors—a fact of which he was blithely unaware—that he thereby averted the usual fear and distrust of magicians, and perhaps some rough handling.

  Branwe was sometimes tempted to handle him roughly himself. Nizzam considered all manual labor beneath his lofty status, and treated those who performed it with a sniffy condescension. His advances toward Srana generally took the form of reassuring her that she was worthy of him, despite her lack of fortune. It was at such times that Branwe found it the most trying to avoid dealing him a few reassurances of his own. He might have to one of these days, in spite of his intentions not to cause Srana additional care. For Nizzam’s pretensions swelled in proportion as the health of the old wizard declined.

  Turning right at the stone dragon, Branwe soon found Master Hoobel himself enduring some rough handling by his own neighbors.

  “ ... I had to count my ice pans three times to be sure.”

  Branwe could hear the angry complaints halfway down the block. The stocky, aproned shopkeeper had hooked Master Hoobel’s gown with a stubby claw, so he couldn’t walk away. Neighbors for blocks around complained about the racket from the one-room school, but not a sound now came through its shutters or open door—a very suspicious circumstance.

  “I thought my memory was slipping,” continued the outraged shopkeeper. “All my berry niblets gone! Not your common grade either, but my finest dewberries! They thought I wouldn’t notice, because they hooked the ice pan too, and rearranged the display case while my back was turned. Do you know where I found the empty pan? In fact, I never did find it myself. It was old Wincwyd. He waved his hand in the general direction of the spiced-fish shop down the street. “Found it by accident in his trash barrel. Don’t interrupt! It was your brats all right. Who else would have done such a thing? It’s not the first time either, but it had better be the last.” He shouted this last through the open door of the classroom. “I’ll be watching. Just let me get my claws on ‘em, and see if they ever play tricks on anybody again! My very finest dewberries yet!” He stalked angrily back toward his shop, grumbling threats every step of the way.

  Shopkeepers and their customers shook their heads in disgust up and down the street, while neighbors glowered down from windows. Despite his vast learning, Master Hoobel was still mystified that so few kits and she-kits could wreak so many pranks on an entire neighborhood. Had they devoted half their ingenuity to lessons, they would all be geniuses.

  “Branwe? Is it really you?” The old schoolmaster squinted at him. His fur was ungroomed, his long purple gown was disheveled, and he had a harried look in his myopic round eyes. “I’m so glad you could come today. So very, very glad.” He led the way through the open door.

  Branwe could not remember the class ever being so quiet and well-behaved. But he noticed that several of the furry little faces had bluish-green stains around the mouth, suspiciously like the color of dewberries, and he caught sly exchanges of winks and the twitching of whiskers among them as he crossed the room to his stool.

  The classroom had once been a cooper’s workshop, and a system of ropeless pulleys still hung from its high ceiling. The firebrick walls were decorated with pictograph cards, maps, and popular drawings of the governor of Kazerclawm and the boy king of Ar. A brown chalkboard ran the width of the room behind the schoolmaster’s desk. There were exactly twenty pupils—twelve kits and eight she-kits—seated at four long tables, whose tops were battle-scarred with initials, names, and caricatures, scratched by furtive little claws.

  Branwe displayed his own claws as he sat down in the corner, where he could attend to both the schoolmaster and his class. The gesture was not missed by the latter, and they had long since learned that he would back it up; also that he was not only tougher than they were, but quicker and more agile. Whatever knowledge they gained here was learned during the afternoon session. Their mornings, when Branwe was not present, were often a riotous shambles.

  This morning must have been just that, and the old schoolmaster looked warily up and down the benches, as if suspicious that the present nice behavior was only a prelude to renewed mischief. But although dreamy and naive in worldly matters, he was experienced enough to realize that the last session before a festival recess was not the time for new lessons, even with young Branwe present.

  “Gerna.” He beckoned to the she-kit at the end of the front table. “Bring me the Dragon Book, please.”

  The kit behind her tried to hook her kilt as she rose, but she agilely dodged him, and tweaked his whiskers so that he sneezed. There was a giddy burst of laughter, and several kits leapt up onto their benches, ready for mischief.

  But Branwe, anticipating them, was already on his feet—arms akimbo, eyes narrowed with warning—and they at once resumed their seats and angelic behavior. He too reseated himself, but never took his eyes off them for an instant.

  “Thank you, Gerna.” The schoolmaster took the big book from her, and she smiled innocently at him. No doubt she made an entirely different face as she turned away, because a titter rippled through the room.

  Again Branwe was on his feet; again the twenty kits looked angelic. But this time he did not reseat himself. Only on special occasions did Master Hoobel read from the collection of old tales and adventures known as the Dragon Book. It was always a favorite diversion with his unruly charges; but the book was so big, and his old eyes so myopic, that his head was always buried from sight while he read. So open
an invitation to mischief was seldom long resisted.

  When Branwe was not present, that is. He too was fascinated by the tales of magical animals, dragons, sorcerers, and the reptile-demons of the Old Race, which had ruled the planet eons ago, before the rise of the mrem; but he listened with an admonitory eye on the class, which remained quiet and attentive throughout the reading, although the old schoolmaster could no longer see them from behind the big book.

  One tale especially fascinated them, a tale even Branwe had never heard before, about how the All-Mother punished the old reptilian race for its evil magic by sinking their homeland beneath the sea. He was so moved in fact that he could feel his fur rise with excitement, as if he were actually the warrior he had long dreamed of becoming, in the midst of a great adventure. He would one day have cause to recall this story, but at the moment the class drew only the most obvious interpretation from his rising fur, and looked very angelic indeed.

  Master Hoobel was gratified at so attentive an audience. It was popularly believed that he read from the big book the way he did because he was thus shielded from missiles. In any case, he did read, and read, and read. What Branwe had expected to be mere classroom drudgery turned out to be a day he never forgot. Nor did the old schoolmaster ever forget it was the day before a festival, and he was shrewd enough not to press his luck. He dismissed the class early.

  Branwe kept them in good order as far as the door; but then even he could do no more, and they fairly exploded into the afternoon sunlight with wild whoops, shouts, and squeaks of joy and high spirits. Windows were flung open, neighbors grumbled complaints, and shopkeepers up and down the street took up defensive positions.

  Branwe, still excited by the tales of magic and adventure, could not help but be affected by such exuberance; but he remained behind, and helped the old schoolmaster straighten the benches and tables, and clean the room. He carried the Dragon Book back to its shelf with the reverence felt only by those to whom books are precious things. The sole book at the Blue Dragon was the innkeeper’s ledger, and nobody else was allowed to read it. Except his wife, of course.