Servant of the Dragon

by David Drake

  "Free you?" Cashel said in surprise. "Why, I'll do that anyway. I didn't know that I could, Master Krias."

  "You didn't know?" Krias said. His voice started shrill and ended like the whine of mosquitoes' wings. "I've spent more ages trapped in this sapphire than there are sand grains on a beach, and you didn't know I wanted to be free?"

  "I didn't know that I could free you," Cashel said calmly. "Tell me what to do and I'll take care of it now."

  Lots of people thought they had to squirm and twist to get what they wanted. There must be some good reason to act that way or there wouldn't be so many people doing it, but Cashel sure couldn't see what it was.

  The times he needed something Cashel asked straight out; and asking him straight was likewise the best way to get him to do something. If only because he generally didn't understand what people were asking when they tried to do it some other way.

  "I'll fight the guard for you," Krias said in the same spiky nervousness as before. "But after that you have no hold on me. I won't take any orders!"

  Cashel smiled. "Master Krias," he said, "I don't recall giving you any orders before now, except when you told me I had to say the words. As for fighting my battles--I've never asked anybody to do that, and I'm sure not asking now. Tell me how to free you. You can go off on your own business while I deal with mine."

  Krias was silent longer than Cashel had expected. "All right, sheep-boy," the demon said at last. "That's what we'll do. Set me on a stone. Call, 'Bridge, bear me to my Sharina.' Just that. And then smash the jewel with the butt of your staff--or a lump of stone, if you'd rather."

  "Oh, I think my staff will do," Cashel said. He worked the ring off his finger. "It's done...."

  Cashel's voice trailed off as he set the ring on the ground, then had to adjust it when the wind tipped it off the knob. There was a lot of wind up here. It didn't seem to affect the mist bubbling in the Chasm like a pot on a rolling boil, but Cashel's sleeves and the skirt of his tunic fluttered like a baby bird demanding food.

  "It's done harder things than that for me," Cashel concluded quietly. He faced the Chasm. "Bridge, carry me to Sharina!" he called.

  He looked down, determining exactly where the ring was. The sapphire winked at him. Holding the quarterstaff heel-to-thumb like a pestle, Cashel brought the iron cap down squarely on the stone. It shattered with a crash.

  Cashel lifted the staff and crossed it before him. The gold setting had smeared; the sapphire was purple dust that began to swirl in the wind.

  "Master Krias?" Cashel said. Nothing answered, though his voice began to echo, "Sharina... Sharina... Sharina..."

  Cashel turned, frowning. The mist was congealing into shimmers of light. It looked like--it looked like a rainbow forming, only this was right in front of him.

  It was a rainbow. It was also a bridge. It spanned the Chasm, from the crag where Cashel stood to a point too distant for his eyes to reach.

  "Thank you for your guidance, Master Krias," Cashel said. He'd thought something would happen when he smashed the ring. Had he maybe misunderstood and flattened the demon along with the gold of the setting? "I guess, well, I'll be getting on my way."

  Sharina... Sharina... Sharina... whispered the cloudy distance.

  The mist was piling up in the middle of the Chasm. If Cashel had seen the same thing high in the summer sky, he'd have said that a storm cloud was rising. This time the cloud had shoulders and a lump of a head in which glittered flashes of red lightning.

  He had seen this before. At Tian.

  The colors of the bridge changed in a continuing cascade but they always shimmered and were as real as sunlight on the deep sea. Cashel had been reaching out the tip of his staff to check how solid the bridge really was; now he pulled it back.

  He wasn't going to be standing over an abyss when he fought the storm giant; not that it'd matter much. He wondered if he looked as pitiful as King Tiew and his knights had done the morning Tian died.

  Sharina would be all right without him. Sure she would.

  Cashel started his staff spinning, getting into the rhythm. A blue spark spat from one ferrule, then the other. Wizardlight, not that Cashel claimed to be a wizard.

  The giant continued to swell out of the mist like a man climbing from the sea on a shelving beach. It raised its club, a mass of writhing thunderheads. The weapon looked as solid as if carved from basalt. Judging from what it'd done to Tian, that was no illusion.

  Even if Cashel was a greater wizard than any he'd met--and he'd met some--he doubted it'd be enough. The storm giant was just too big to be stopped by any spell that wouldn't as surely sink the ground the wizard stood on. Just too big....

  Poor Lia. Poor Tian.

  The ground beside Cashel crackled. The hair on his arms stood on end and his neck was prickly. He looked down. Purple lightning sizzled where he'd smashed the ring, growing with the sudden speed of a spark catching in thistledown.

  Cashel stepped back, blinking as burned air stung his eyes and nostrils. The snarling lightning continued to swell into a figure.

  Into the figure of Krias.

  The demon was as tall as a house, then as tall as a tree. He stepped from one crag to another, bunching his flashing limbs--

  And leaped toward the storm giant as the latter swung its club.

  The figures crashed together, lighting both sky and the depths of the Chasm from which the giant had risen. A cloud arm flung Krias into the cliff, blasting a section of rock into pebbles. Krias sprang up like a ball and lunged for his opponent's throat. He caught the shoulder instead and bit into thunder. Rain slashed from the wound, clearing the mist beneath it for farther than an eye could see.

  "Go on, sheep-boy!" crackled a voice of purple fire. "Go off on your own business while I deal with mine!"

  Cashel shouldered his staff and started across the bridge. The surface was cold and had no spring, like sod frozen before the snow falls to soften it. He lengthened his stride. He wasn't running, but he'd seen enough fights to have a bad feeling about how this one was going to come out. Sharina was on the other side of the bridge. Now that Cashel had decided he was going to live after all, that was important to him.

  Krias' crackling violet presence was huge, but the cloud giant had swelled to the size of an island. This was like watching a rat battle a bulldog.

  The ring demon spun free and hunched in mid air. The giant's club rose. Krias leaped, under the weapon but trying again for the giant's throat. Teeth of sizzling lightning savaged another flood of rain from the wrist the giant managed to put in the way.

  Krias wasn't a rat. Krias was a weasel, and just possibly...

  Cashel started to jog. He was past the middle of the span. He still couldn't see to the other side, but his feet were descending the chill, rigid slope. When he looked straight down into the Chasm, he saw twinkles of light as numerous as the stars on a winter's night.

  They were stars. Cashel recognized constellations: the Lady's Train, Hell Mouth with its two guardian stars, the Flock--

  He jerked his eyes away as vertigo swept over him in a sudden rush. If the stars were below....

  The bridge, the shifting solid light, was coming to an end ahead of Cashel. He couldn't see anything beyond it, just an absence the way a tree rises into the sky and stops.

  If the stars were below him, would he fall forever?

  Thunder crashed and lightning turned the sky violet. Cashel looked around, though he kept trotting forward.

  A wrack of clouds was beginning to dissipate over the Chasm. In the midst of them, capering like the demon he was, Krias shouted, "Free! I'm free! I'm free forevermore!"

  Cashel stepped into a wall of chill darkness. He wasn't sure whether he really heard the final shout, "Cashel, I'm free!"

  But he hoped it was true.

  "Now if Harn's bridge took us where you wished to go, Mistress Ilna," said Chalcus as he led them through the ice cave with his sword bare, "then your tastes and mine differ."

 
"As I'm sure they do!" Ilna said tartly. The cave was a wormhole, not a straight course from the ledge where the stub of Harn's cable still hung, but blue light through the ceiling and walls illuminated the passage sufficiently. "I wouldn't think they were as different as this, however. Perhaps Harn was joking with us. His final joke."

  "I see soldiers in the ice," Merota said in a tiny voice. "Do you think they're real, Ilna?"

  Ilna grimaced. The light was a little better than it needed to be: it showed not only the trio's path but also the figures frozen into the walls of the glacier. Their spiked helmets had veils of of bronze links. Lower-ranking troops wore tabards of scarlet with gold embroidery over mail cuirasses, but their leaders were splendid in jewel-accented breastplates of silver and gold.

  "I suppose they are," Ilna said truthfully. "But they can't hurt us, so I don't see that it matters."

  The second half of Ilna's statement was too assured. She'd have phrased it more circumspectly if she were quite as truthful as she knew she ought to be. She pursed her lips.

  "Just so, child," the chanteyman said cheerfully. He picked up a scrap of metal from the cave's floor and waved it behind him for the others to see. It was half the blade of a dagger, engraved with a hunting scene barely visible beneath the verdigris. "Their blades are bronze."

  Chalcus cast the metal aside with a laugh and continued, "How many ages has it been since men fought with bronze, do you think? Whoever put our cold friends beneath this ice has kept them there for long enough that we needn't fear for the little while we'll be traipsing past them."

  What Ilna noticed--and from the way Chalcus carried his sword, he had too--was that the dagger blade appeared to have been chewed off. She and her companions were in no danger from those dead, but whatever dug through the heart of the glacier to eat the dead was perhaps another matter.

  "We're coming clear of the tunnel, I think," the chanteyman said. "I won't miss it."

  His laughter caroled cheerfully despite the whistle of a fierce wind past the mouth of the tunnel. "Though I shouldn't say that, do you think, lest I tempt the Lady to prove me wrong?"

  "If I believed in the Lady," Ilna said more sharply than she'd intended, "then the Lady I believed in would have better uses for her time than playing grim jokes."

  "Don't you believe in the Lady, Mistress Ilna?" Merota said in surprise.

  "I don't know what I believe in any more," Ilna said curtly. "I used to think the world was a simpler place than I've found it recently. It's not a better place, child, but it's not simple."

  They stepped, side by side, onto a windswept plain. Their tunnel was one of many in the face of a glacier stretching across the horizon; rivulets from each snaked across the stony ground, braiding into streams. Lichens and stunted vegetation softened the outlines of rocks toward the sun in the far south.

  "I wouldn't mind sharing this place with others," said Chalcus softly as he eyed six figures standing a bowshot away. "But I don't think I'm willing to share it with those fellows, eh, mistress?"

  "No," Ilna said, slinging her noose and taking the hank of cords from her sleeve. This wasn't going to be easy, if it was even possible. "I doubt they'd accept our presence either; but regardless, we can't let whatever they're doing continue."

  A wizard whose garments were half black, half white, stood on one side of a brazier; across from him was the mummified corpse of something man-sized but not human. The mummy's age-browned linen wrappings fluttered in the wind. They--both--were chanting. Ilna felt the words she couldn't hear, the way she'd felt the pulse of the torrent before she entered Harn's cavern.

  Another wizard was present, all in black, but he had no part in the incantation. He'd been watching a rod of light which stood upright in the center of a circle. The light bent toward Ilna, then vanished.

  The wizard looked up and shouted an order. The words were only a puff of sound by the time they reached Ilna.

  "The other man doesn't have a head," Merota said, her voice a skin of calm over boiling hysteria. "He has a thing where his head ought to be. One of the Great Ones."

  "Indeed that's so, child," the chanteyman said, "but I dare say it'll come off just the way real heads do."

  His sword made a graceful figure in the air. "Though that may have to wait a time for more pressing business."

  The other three figures were huge insect-like monsters. At the wizard's summons, they rose on their jointed legs and started toward the interlopers. Their jaws opened sideways and clashed edges of ragged chitin together when they closed again.

  "I'll deal with the wizard," Ilna said. I'll try to deal with the wizard. "I'm afraid the rest are for you, Master Chalcus."

  "I'll help," Merota said.

  Ilna and the chanteyman glanced down at her. Neither spoke.

  "I will!" the child said angrily. "They'll chase me and you can kill them!"

  "Indeed," said Chalcus, "if they're no brighter than they look and with Mistress Ilna occupying the fellow who'd be directing them... I think you're very likely right, milady."

  Ilna squatted to make her body a better shield against the wind that wanted to disrupt her pattern. Her companions walked forward, moving to their right at an angle to the direct line between Ilna and the brazier where a wizard and a mummy still concentrated on matters not of the present world.

  Neither Ilna nor Chalcus bothered to say that Merota would be in danger. The child knew that; and anyway, there was no safety in this chill wasteland.

  In particular, there's no safety for our enemies. On my honor!

  Ilna's fingers wove with the silent certainty of stars wheeling in the black heavens. The black-clad wizard intoned his spell in a singsong which reached Ilna as only a faint rhythm. As he sang, he held his left arm out toward Chalcus with three fingers extended.

  The monsters shambled forward like a leash of hounds, spreading apart slightly as they advanced. One of them would be in position to cut the chanteyman off if he dodged in either direction.

  Ilna smiled faintly and tugged her pattern tight. The wizard gasped. His arm twisted down, the fingers cramping into an arthritic knot. He turned and, instead of watching the swordsman, met Ilna's eyes across the scree of rocks.

  Chalcus must have said something to the girl. The chanteyman froze; Merota sprinted toward the left. Released from the wizard's control, the three monsters turned as one to follow her.

  The wizard looked toward his leader, but the headless thing at the brazier was intent on its own incantation. The wizard knelt. He drew an athame of chased silver from his sash and started to scrape a circle in the rocky soil.

  Ilna tightened another knot. The wizard's hand jerked inward. The athame's edge was too dull to pierce the wizard's robe, but the point jabbed hard enough into his belly to double him up in pain.

  Ilna was breathing hoarsely, but her fingers continued to loop cords into complex patterns. She was still smiling.

  Chalcus danced forward, flicking his sword in a figure-8 as he passed behind the first insect. He cut from the inside and severed the lowest joint of the creature's hindmost legs. Though the insect limbs didn't have hamstrings, they nonetheless had equivalent connections.

  The monster twisted backward on its remaining pairs of legs and gave a shrill cry. Chalcus was already crippling the second creature with a similar pair of cuts. The motion was as graceful as the curve of a gull's wing, but the blade's kinked edge slung drops of ichor through the air like an amber necklace as the stroke finished.

  The black-clad wizard staggered toward Ilna, his lips twisting as he spoke words of power. Ilna felt the air around her thicken as though lightning was about to strike nearby. She opened a gap in her pattern, then locked it with another knot. The wizard stumbled and fell hard, knocking the breath from his lungs.

  Ilna was sweating like a scytheman in high summer. The wind made her shiver, but still beads formed on her forehead and trickled down her spine beneath her tunics. All her muscles were trembling; all except those of her fing
ers, knotting a pattern as subtle as the interplay of high cirrus clouds.

  The third creature was turning to meet Chalcus. Instead of dodging backward, the chanteyman leaped toward it and struck at the knee joints of the middle and hindmost leg on the side nearest him. The monster would've toppled over if it hadn't planted the left foreleg to support it. Chalcus laughed and struck again, severing the foreleg also. Only then did he jump clear as the creature rolled sideways like a maggot fallen from a carcase.

  The wizard rose to his knees. Ilna twisted a cord and pulled it tight. She'd clamped her jaws together, but still her teeth chattered.

  The wizard almost got to his feet before he fell on his face. Ilna had to put the flat of her hand to the ground to keep from toppling also. She closed her eyes and let her strength build, breathing deeply.

  Chalcus gasped through his open mouth. He knelt on one knee, waving his sword to keep the attention of the two insects which were still mobile. Perhaps he thought that because the monsters were crippled, six yards was a sufficient margin.

  It was, but barely. The creatures charged like rams battling to rule a flock, spurning large stones behind them. The chanteyman started to rise, realized the creatures were coming much too fast to flee, and hurled himself between them.

  The monsters spun, both of them turning inward. Their mandibles tangled momentarily instead of either one clashing shut on Chalcus' chest. The chanteyman rolled under the massive abdomen of the insect on his right.

  It turned again--the creatures' hind feet were dangling but the lack seemed to cost them nothing in terms of speed and agility--but this time Chalcus was ready. He slashed forehand and backhand in another figure-8, chopping both knee joints on the creature's left side. Like Chalcus' previous victim, it crashed down on its thorax and drove a furrow in the stony ground.

  The chanteyman crouched, using the monster as a shield. The creature's two unbroken right legs tried to shove the body around to where its mandibles could reach its tormenter.