Servant of the Dragon

by David Drake

  The man who'd tried to help ducked out of the way. Mastyn toppled forward and went over the side. He was still screaming at an invisible horror when the sea covered his face.

  "Now the rest of you...," Chalcus said, stepping between Ilna and the remainder of his armed fellows. "Step back and give our guest some room. Mastyn like to have topped me when he nutted, and I don't need one of you lot finishing the job."

  The sailor Mastyn had wounded when he went berserk lay on the deck with two of his fellows trying to staunch the blood. Ilna doubted they could do much for the victim. The cutlass had cut to the bone, a remarkable blow with a blade that was none too sharp. The bosun had used a madman's strength in his last moments, of that there was no doubt.

  A sailor near the jib pole bitts raised his pike tentatively. Chalcus pointed his own weapon at the fellow's face and said, "Did you hear me, Andro?"

  The pikeman lowered his point. Disease had left deep pits on his face above the line of his beard and moustache. "Getting soft, Chalcus?" he snarled.

  "Maybe, Andro," Chalcus said in a tone that lilted as pleasantly as it did in his chanteys. Despite the kink in the blade's tip, a thrust with Chalcus' shoulders behind it would carry the sharp point through the front and back both of Andro's chest. "But not so soft that I won't feed you bits of your own liver if you cross me on this."

  Ilna smiled despite herself. Now that was a promise she'd be willing to wager her small hope of redemption on.

  Vonculo and two sailors with capstan bars struggled through the press amidships to halt a dozen feet from Ilna. The sailing master held a bow with an arrow nocked. "What's going on here?" he said. His voice shimmered with rage and fear. "What's happened to Mastyn?"

  "He started swinging his cutlass at whoever was close," Chalcus said mildly, turning to face the sailing master. He lowered his sword so that the point was near the deck. "He went over the side, but he's killed Ipis or I'm a nun."

  Chalcus' sword flicked in the direction of the victim. His fellows seemed to have staunched the blood, but the wounded man's face was sallow and his whole body was beginning to shiver despite the hot sun.

  Ilna grimaced. She broke the knots into which she'd fixed another set of cords and retied them in a wholly different pattern.

  "Sister take him!" Vonculo said in bitter desperation. "I have the course but he's the only one who knew anything more."

  His eyes focused on Ilna and Merota again. "What are you doing here?" he demanded.

  "The girl came aboard," Ilna said. "I came after her."

  "She's a wizard," muttered someone behind his hand; maybe the pikeman, Andro.

  "I've heard that," Vonculo said without expression. He stared at Ilna coldly, then went on, "You can go over the side now, mistress, or you can come with us to where we're going. Which will it be?"

  Ilna detached Merota's arms gently and knelt beside the wounded sailor. The men holding him flinched back. She spread her new pattern of knots before the victim's blank eyes. His body relaxed and color started to return to his skin.

  Ilna stood. "Get the cut bandaged properly," she snapped to the men who'd acted as nurses. "I can bring him out of shock, but that won't help long if all his blood drains out."

  She turned and looked at the sailing master. Reaching out, she linked her hand with Merota's again. The island and the folk marooned upon it were a good bowshot away by now.

  "Lady Merota and I will accompany you," Ilna said without expression. There were too many of them to fight, even with her weapons, and what would she do if she did manage to send them all over the side? Drift till she and the girl starved, she supposed.

  "Glad to have you aboard, mistress," Chalcus said from behind her. "Some of us are, at any rate."

  Chapter Eleven

  The bridge was still transparent--Garric culd see occasional lanterns on the far shore of the Beltis, gleaming through the fabric of light--but it had become solid. It seemed more real than the silent buildings on the riverside, in fact.

  "The streets are so dead," Liane said, looking around at the nearby tenements. "Where has everybody gone?"

  When Garric first visited, the Bridge District had been bustlingly full of people--ordinary residents going on with their lives as well as the crowd viewing the apparition hanging above the river. The activity had reminded him of the way termites pour out of their nests in late spring, spreading to new habitations. Cheap wine, vegetables cooking, fish offal, human wastes, and a thousand lesser odors blended to give the atmosphere a bubbling, vibrant life.

  Now the smells were stale. Smoke from charcoal fires no longer hung in the air. The shops on the ground floors of the buildings had their shutters locked down, and the stairs to the apartments on the upper levels were silent instead of echoing with the cries of children and the adults responsible for them.

  A creature of red light ran down the street, tossing its head in anger. It looked like a bull, but it was eight feet tall at the shoulder and its nostrils snorted flame. For an instant its hooves hammered and sparked on the cobblestones; then the sound ceased and the creature's image began to fade. It started across the bridge before vanishing from the eyes of Garric and his companions. He thought he heard another flurry of hoof strikes; then nothing.

  "The residents left because they're afraid," Tenoctris said as Liane helped her out of the sedan chair. The others in the party were on foot; the guards because Garric was, and Liane for the same reason though he'd have been as happy to have her carried at his side in another chair. "They're right to be afraid."

  The escort of Blood Eagles shouldered their shields again when the bull disappeared, though they couldn't be said to have relaxed. Besimon, the commander of the escort, grimaced at Garric, but he didn't try to urge his prince to leave this dangerous location.

  Garric would rather walk than be carried--and he'd rather have crawled than ride a horse, though sometimes horses were the only practical means of transportation. King Carus had been an experienced rider; his reflexes would keep Garric on even a mettlesome animal. But Garric's muscles would be the ones aching the next morning, and nothing could make him like being at the mercy of a beast that weighed six or eight times as much as he did.

  "It reminds me of Klestis when I'm dreaming," Garric said. "The buildings still stand, but everybody's gone from them."

  "Like a city that's been captured after a siege," Carus said, watching through Garric's eyes but analyzing their surroundings with the mind of an experienced man of war. "Though there'd be more smoke then. And there'd be the smell of death; that you wouldn't miss."

  A detachment of the City Watch approached, jogging down a side-street; they must've been warned that the prince was visiting the district. There were four in the squad instead of the six that would have been its full strength.

  Besimon went to meet the City Watchmen. The squad's officer wore a silvered helmet and carried a sword; the three ordinary Watchmen had brass helmets and hardwood staves with a knob on one end. Their metal equipment shimmered with the cold blue glare of the bridge.

  "Danger from the bull?" Liane asked.

  "Danger from things like the thing that took the semblance of a bull," Tenoctris said. "There's always a risk when planes of the cosmos leak into one another; and there are some planes whose inhabitants pose a very great risk to any humans with whom they come in contact."

  Garric turned from watching Besimon and the Watchmen. "And to Sharina?" he asked.

  Liane took the satchel with Tenoctris' paraphernalia from the tray under the chair. The old wizard shrugged. "I'm sure by now that Sharina was abducted deliberately, not simply taken by one of the entities entering through this weak point in the cosmos. There's risk to her, of course; but--"

  She smiled. Tenoctris looked decades younger when she did that.

  "--probably less danger than there is to the rest of us, standing here. I need the bridge's weight on the fabric of the cosmos to pass us to where we'll find Alman; but the sooner we're away, the safer
we'll be."

  "Ah," said Garric as another thought struck him. "Do you need me to help set up?"

  "I need only someone to hold the lantern," Tenoctris said. "Liane can do that."

  "Right," Garric said, nodding. "I'll join you soon."

  He walked over to Besimon and the Watchmen. Instead of letting Garric step through them, thirty of the Blood Eagles strode forward to preserve their cordon about him. The other twelve moved toward the bridge with the two women, the parties for whose safety they were responsible.

  The two bearers stood beside the sedan chair. They looked nervously after the soldiers, though Garric wondered how much protection the troops' weapons really gave against threats like the bull-thing that had passed a moment before.

  "Under-Commander Copelo here has been telling me that the buildings for three blocks around are deserted during the nighttime, your highness," Besimon said as he turned to face Garric. He used a professional tone, but it was obvious from the way the Blood Eagle stood--slightly shielding the Watchman with his body--that he sympathized with the fellow. "He and his men patrol the edges of the area, but not as a general rule along the river itself."

  "Residents come back during daylight, some of them," Copelo said. His jaws worked, chewing moisture out of his dry cheeks. "Maybe half of them. But there's not the folks from the big houses visiting to gawk, and at night there's not even the thieves you'd expect with places empty the way they are. So we don't...."

  His voice trailed off. He rubbed the pommel of his sword, staring at the cobblestones, and went on, "Ah, there's a lot of sickness in the squad already, and we don't...."

  "I understand completely," Garric said. These men were braver than their fellows who claimed to be sick; and maybe those men weren't cowards either. If Garric let himself think about it, he'd be nervous too; the bridge had an eery wrongness as he stood beside it now, though when he crossed it in his dreams it was no more than an incident of his journey. "Take your men back to their normal patrol route."

  Garric smiled; engagingly, he hoped. His own lips were dry. "Normal until my friends and I manage to remove this bridge, that is, I mean," he added.

  The squad leader gave Garric a look of enormous relief and turned. "Let's--"

  He paused and spun around again. "That is, yes, your highness!" and saluted by crossing right arm over his chest.

  Garric waved Copelo away, smiling in amusement this time. "Besimon," he went on, "I want you to take your men--and those with Ladies Tenoctris and Liane--back a bowshot from here also. You won't be any use to us, and--"

  "Your highness, we're here to guard you," the Blood Eagle interrupted. "You can't--"

  "We're not going to be here," Garric said. "This is a dangerous location, but Tenoctris is taking us through it to another place. When we come back, you can return to your duty."

  "Oh," Besimon said. He glanced at the women. Tenoctris had sketched a figure on the cobblestones with a stick of lead and was now adding words of power around the perimeter. "We should come with you to--"

  "Not unless you're wizards yourself," Garric said, trampling the protest before Besimon got it out. "Tenoctris can only take the three of us."

  "Oh," Besimon repeated. "Well, I--"

  He caught himself. Drawing up in a brace, he saluted so firmly that his blackened-bronze cuirass bonged at the impact. "Yes, your highness."

  Turning, Besimon shouted, "Form column of fours! His highness has stationed us at the fountain we passed just up the street. On the double!"

  The Blood Eagles trotted toward the nearby intersection with as much noise as a dozen brewer's drays: their hobnails crashed on the stone pavement, their aprons of studded leather strips rattled, and they drummed their spears against their shield bosses every time their right heels came down. The troops were obeying orders, but nobody could imagine that they were skulking away in fear.

  Tenoctris was ready; she and Liane watched Garric as he stepped quickly back to them. The wizard had drawn a seven-pointed star in lime-wash on a slab that had been part of the abutments of the Old Kingdom bridge. The bridge that spanned universes, not the river, was close enough that Garric could have put his foot on its approaches. Would it support him as it did in his dreams?

  "It'll be solid enough to walk on soon," Tenoctris said, demonstrating again a striking awareness of what those around her were thinking. "And I think we'll need to do that, or someone will. But for now I'm just using its presence to help us to Alman through--"

  Carus' instincts, not Garric's eyes, warned Garric to turn before even Liane, who was looking toward Garric, reacted. He wasn't wearing body armor or a helmet, but he drew his long sword in a sring! of the patterned-steel blade against the scabbard's iron lip.

  The man running toward them from the shadow of a tenement was a bulky blur. The wizardlight distorted the objects around it. Garric didn't see a weapon, but--

  "Wait!" the figure cried in a squeal of rising fright. It flung its arms up in the air. "Garric, it's me!"

  Garric slid his sword back in its sheath. He was trembling between laughter and fury. His mind understood that there was no danger, but his body would be keyed up to fight or flee for the Lady knew how long!

  "Katchin," Garric said, "if one of Besimon's men had looked back and seen you, you'd have had a javelin between your shoulder-blades. And that's just what you deserved."

  The Blood Eagles faced around in front of the cracked stone basin, all that remained of the fountain which had graced the plaza under the Old Kingdom. The bronze statue--"A nymph on a sea-horse," Carus remembered inconsequentially, and Garric had a vision of these same streets when his ancestor paraded through Valles a thousand years before--had been stolen or melted into coins centuries past. If Besimon noticed in the deceptive lighting that Garric's party was now four, not three, he nonetheless kept himself and his troops where Garric had ordered them to be.

  "Now Garric, Garric," Katchin the Miller said in a tone of oily fullness. "It's your own fault that I had to meet you this way. Your fault for not keeping your servants in check, that is, but I well know how hard it is to get decent help these days."

  Garric had known the miller all his life. He recognized the manner as the one Katchin displayed to wealthy drovers who came to Barca's Hamlet during the Sheep Fair. Its bantering attempt to claim equality was very different from the way Katchin abjectly fawned on real nobles, and more different still from the boastfully superior fashion in which he treated--or tried to treat--all his neighbors in the borough.

  Liane looked furious. If Garric hadn't been so clearly in charge, she'd have shouted for Besimon to come rid them of this distraction. As it was, her habit of polite deference trapped her.

  Tenoctris looked on with her usual expression of mild interest toward matters that didn't affect her directly. She held the lead stick with which she'd drawn the figure for her incantation. Apparently she intended to use it as her wand as well.

  "You didn't hear what I said, Katchin," Garric said quietly. "Those men there would have killed you if they'd seen you running toward me. They practice with their weapons for three hours a day."

  "But Gar--" Katchin began.

  Garric reached out and took the older man's chin between his right thumb and forefinger. He didn't squeeze hard, but he lifted Katchin's jaw slightly and clipped the words off behind the teeth.

  "Katchin, you knew you had no business here," Garric said. "You're too foolish to realize that you were risking your life, even now that I've told you in the clearest words I can imagine. You know that you gave up all pride to beg for a job, though."

  He released Katchin, who stepped back gasping and wide-eyed. For a moment Garric thought that he'd understood, but a moment later Katchin's face reformed itself into familiar lines.

  "Well, I knew you'd want to have me in a position of trust," Katchin said, his voice returning to fullness and roundness with each syllable. "Tried friends from your home are too rare to waste. And the truth is, of course, I'm the only
person in the borough with the experience to serve in this larger arena. I'm Count Lascarg's bailiff, you know."

  "Katchin, you're right that I know you well," Garric said. He smiled in amusement that the miller could say all those things not only with a straight face but with obvious belief. Everybody in the borough knew that Katchin the Miller was a windbag, a liar, and a cheat; albeit a wealthy windbag, liar, and cheat.

  Everybody knew that but Katchin himself, apparently.

  "Ah!" Katchin said. "Now I don't want to complain about Reise, Garric--"

  Garric raised a hand. Katchin continued, "I know he raised you, but--"

  Garric reached out again. Katchin clapped both hands over his mouth and fell silent. His eyes bulged at Garric in horror.

  "I'm sure that with the way the royal service has expanded...," Garric said. He tried to keep his voice steady, but a little of the passion came through. He'd always hated bullies, even after he'd grown to where they couldn't bully him. "I'm sure we've employed other men as bad as you are, Katchin: petty tyrants who grind down their subordinates and the citizens who have to deal with them, but who fawn on anybody who seems to have power. I'm sure we've employed such men."

  He leaned forward. Katchin was of average height for haft; Garric was taller than most people from Ornifal, where men averaged a handspan taller than those of Haft. He towered over the miller.

  "But they were hired because I didn't know them," Garric said, letting his voice rise. He wasn't shouting; not yet at least. "I do know you. Go home, Katchin. Go home now!"

  "But I've come all this ways at my own expense!" the miller wailed through the fence of his fingers. He sounded on the verge of crying.

  "And I'm telling you to go back!" Garric said. "Go treat your neighbors like neighbors, not as sheep to be sheared by loans at crippling interest--the way you robbed your own brother! Not like dirt to be trampled on for the sake of your pretensions. If you can prove to me that you're a man worthy of promotion, then maybe at some day in the future I'll come back to Barca's Hamlet and take you into my service. And even if I don't, Katchin, then you'll still have had the good fortune to have become a worthy man!"