The Dragon’s Path

by Abraham Daniel

  Outside the shuttered window, a salt thrush sang. Cithrin ran her fingers through her hair. Something in this had to be of use. Somewhere in the papers, Qahuar would have said something that told something of what his offer to the governor would be. She reached for another letter, and her arm brushed the lantern. Glass and metal shifted, teetered, and she grabbed it. A second more and it would have fallen. Shattered. Lit the room on fire. Cithrin put it carefully in the middle of the writing desk and went back to her search with trembling hands.

  Hours seemed to pass before she found it. A long scroll of fine cotton. The lines of cipher were spaced widely enough that Qahuar had been able to write the message beneath them. Cithrin ran her fingertips along his words. It had been written by an elder of the clan, and it was everything Cithrin had hoped to discover. They could commit fifteen ships to the effort. Each would be manned with a full crew of two dozen sailors. She kept on reading, her fingers making a soft hushing against the cloth. In compensation, they would ask sixteen hundredths of every transaction in each port for ships accompanied and protected, or nineteen if they asked the clan to guarantee. The elder estimated the initial outlay at two thousand silver, with a profit to the clan of five hundred in a season. The agreement would have to be for a full decade.

  Magister Imaniel had often talked about the tools of memory. Ink was best, but writing the figures down and sneaking them out of the house was a risk she didn’t have to take. Fifteen ships of two dozen men.

  “At the age of fifteen, she’d had two dozen men,” Cithrin said to herself.

  Sixteen hundredths without guarantee, or nineteen with. So the guarantee was worth three.

  “Sixteen for the company, and three more for love.”

  Two thousand to begin, with an estimated profit of five hundred each year of a ten-year agreement.

  “She gave two thousand kisses, took five hundred back, and died alone ten years after that.”

  There were more details in the scroll—the specifications of the ships, the names of individual captains, the routes the trade would be encouraged to take—and she read as much of it as she could, but at the base, she had what she needed.

  She put the scroll back where it had been, then put the lantern in its place and blew the flame out. Used to the light as she’d become, the darkness seemed absolute. The smell of spent wick was acrid and sharp. She closed her eyes and, tracing fingers along the wall, found her way to the door. She slipped into the corridor, turned the lock, and, almost skipping, went back to Qahuar’s sleeping chamber. She put the key in the corner where she’d found it, stripped off the tunic, and slipped quickly back into bed.

  Qahuar murmured and reached out an arm to drape over her belly.

  “You’re cold,” he said, the words thick.

  “I’ll be warm soon,” she said, and felt his smile as much as she saw it. He nuzzled against her, and she tried to let herself relax into him. She closed her eyes and repeated her rhyme in the privacy of her mind.

  At the age of fifteen, she’d had two dozen men, sixteen for company and three more for love. She gave two thousand kisses, took five hundred back, and died alone ten years after that.

  Well, you look exhausted,” Captain Wester said, leaning against the wall beside the pot of tulips where the old gambler’s caller used to stand. “I was starting to think we’d have to put together a raiding party, take you back by force.”

  “I told you I wouldn’t be back,” Cithrin said, walking past him toward her private entrance. He followed her as if she’d invited him.

  “You’re supposed to be meeting with that woman from the needlemakers’ guild at midday. She’s likely on her way to that coffee house right now. Unless you’re planing to wear that same dress—”

  “I can’t see her,” Cithrin said, walking up the stairs. She heard his footsteps falter, then hurry to catch up. When he spoke, his voice was careful and polite. It sounded like he was talking from half a mile away.

  “Do you want to give her a reason?”

  “Send someone. Tell her I’m ill.”

  “All right.”

  Cithrin sat down on her divan, scowling up at the man. His arms were crossed over his chest, his mouth pinched. He wasn’t really much older than Qahuar Em. Cithrin pulled off one of her shoes and massaged her foot. The sole was filthy. Her dress hung from her as if the cloth itself was exhausted and sweating.

  “I didn’t sleep,” she said. “I can’t help her anyway.”

  “If you say so,” Wester said, nodding curtly. He turned to leave, and her sudden rush of distress flooded her. She hadn’t known how badly she didn’t want to be alone.

  “Did everything go well while I was gone?” she said, her voice tripping out of her.

  Wester stopped at the head of the stairs.

  “Went fine,” he said.

  “Are you angry with me, Captain?”

  “No,” he said. “I’m going to go tell the needlemakers’ woman that you’re too ill to see her. I take it we’ll send her a note when you’re feeling better?”

  Cithrin pulled off her other shoe and nodded. Wester went down the stairs. The door clacked closed behind him. Cithrin lay back. The night had been everything she’d hoped, but the first blue light of dawn had left her exhausted. Her body felt limp and shaky the way it had all those nights with the caravan when sleep had escaped her. She’d convinced herself that those days were over, but she’d been wrong. And now, say it or not, Wester was angry, and she was surprised how much his disapproval stung.

  She thought of calling him back, of explaining that she’d allowed herself to be seduced for a reason. That going to Qahuar Em’s bed had only been a ploy. The more she rehearsed the words, the worse they sounded. Voices rose up from the floor beneath her. The guards that Wester had hired. From the sound, they were playing at dice. Her spine ached. Someone below her shouted in dismay, and others groaned along in sympathy. She closed her eyes, hoping that being back in her own rooms would relax her enough that she could rest. Instead, her mind jumped and hopped, faster and faster, like a ball rolling down an infinite hill.

  Fifteen ships could be split into three equal groups of five or else five of three, so perhaps Qahuar’s clan was expecting the merchant ships to divide into three major ports—likely Carse, Lasport, and Asinport. But what if they were expecting the trade to go on past Asterilhold to Antea or Sarakal or Hallskar? Two dozen men in a single ship wasn’t a small thing, but would Lyoniean sailors do well in the colder waters of the north? Could she argue, with her ties to Carse, that she’d be able to provide ships more experienced in the native waters? And if she made the argument, would it be true?

  And why had Opal betrayed her? And why had God let Magister Imaniel die? And Cam? And her parents? And did Sandr still want her? Would Cary still be her friend? Did Master Kit still approve of who and what she was? What did other people do when they had no friends and their lovers were their enemies? There had to be some better way to do things.

  The tears welled up in her eyes and trickled down her cheeks. She didn’t feel sad. She barely felt anything at all besides tired and annoyed with herself. She was suffering some sort of little fit, and she could wait until it passed. The dice game shifted, and two men’s voices caught up a tune, coming together and apart.

  Cithrin forced herself to sitting. Then standing. Then she stripped off last night’s clothes and put on a simple skirt and blouse. She tied back her hair until she saw the little bite marks that Qahuar had left on her neck and let her hair back down. She filled the little basin by her bedside, washed her face. The paints Cary had left were there, and Cithrin considered remaking Magistra Cithrin of the Medean bank. She decided against it—she had little enough energy as it was—and went downstairs.

  When she opened the door, the company went quiet. The two Firstblood men looked at each other and then away. The paler of them was blushing visibly. The Kurtadam man nodded.

  “Sorry about that, Magistra,” he said. “Didn’
t think you were here.”

  Cithrin waved the concern away.

  “Yardem?” she said.

  “In the back room, Magistra,” the Kurtadam said.

  Cithrin walked past the guards to the rear, then through into the darkness. Yardem Hane lay on a long, low cot, fingers laced over his belly. His eyes were closed, his ears folded and soft. Cithrin was just about to turn around, putting the conversation off for another time, when he spoke.

  “Help you, ma’am?”

  “Um. Yes. Yardem,” she said. “You know the captain as well as anybody.”

  “That’s true,” the Tralgu said, his eyes still closed and his voice calm.

  “I think I may have upset him,” she said.

  “You wouldn’t be the first, ma’am. If it gets to be a problem, the captain will tell you.”

  “All right.”

  “Anything else, ma’am?”

  The Tralgu didn’t move apart from the ride and fall of his chest.

  “I slept with a man, and now I’m going to betray him,” she said, and her voice sounded as grey and hard as slate. “I have to do it to keep my bank, but I think I feel guilty about it.”

  Yardem opened one soft black eye.

  “I forgive you,” the Tralgu said.

  Cithrin nodded. She shut the door behind her when she left, then walked back out the street and up her private stair. The voices below her were quiet now, aware that the owner of the house might hear them. She sat at her writing desk, took out the books, and began drafting the proposal that would beat out Qahuar Em.

  Geder

  Geder couldn’t say exactly when they left the dragon’s road. At first, it was only that wind and weather had heaped dirt and desert hardpack over the path, even as it passed through a few of the sprawling caravanserais that passed for cities in the Keshet. Then the last of the great meeting places fell away behind him, and the jade of the roadway became rarer, the brown of the earth and yellow-grey of desert grass more common. Then the path was only visible as a stretch where the scrub and weeds were smaller, their roots blocked inches from the surface.

  And then it was gone, and Geder was riding through the mountains and valleys at the eastern edge of the world. The trees were thin and twisting, with thick, almost ropey bark that seemed designed to imitate stone. At night, tiny lizards with bright yellow tails skittered across the ground and through the tents. Morning often found one or more dead in the horses’ feed sacks. Water became scarce enough that every muddy wisp of a creek meant his five servants would fill everything that would hold moisture, and even so Geder often saw their supply fall to less than half. Every night, he heard the servants talking about bandits and unclean spirits that haunted the empty places in the world. Even though no new dangers appeared, he slept poorly.

  Geder had spent most of his life within the limits of Antea. Travel had meant the journey from Rivenhalm to Camnipol, or along the king’s winter hunt to Kavinpol, Sevenpol, Estinport. He’d been Kaltfel, royal city of Asterilhold, once as a boy to watch an obscure relation be married. And he had gone on campaign to Vanai under Lord Ternigan, and then Sir Alan Klin. He’d never imagined himself traveling alone or nearly so in lands so barren and cut off that the local villagers had never heard of Antea or the Severed Throne. But when he came to a stand of shacks clumped around a thin, hungry-looking lake, the wary men who came out to meet him shook their heads and shrugged.

  He could as well have told them he’d come from the stars or the deep lands under the earth. It would have meant as much, and possibly more. The mountains’ inhabitants were Firstblood, but of a uniform olive complexion with dark eyes and thick wiry hair that made them seem like members of a single extended family. Some few knew the civilized languages well enough to trade with the outposts, but for the greater part they spoke in a local patois that Geder could almost put together from some of the ancient books he’d read. He felt he’d ridden into the dim past.

  “Sinir,” Geder said. “Are these the Sinir mountains?”

  The young man looked over his shoulder at the dozen men who had come from the village and licked his lips.

  “Not here,” the man said. “East.”

  On the one hand, everyone he met in the empty, ragged mountains seemed to recognize the word, to know what he meant when he asked. On the other, the Sinir mountains had been just a bit to the east for almost two weeks now, retreating before him like a mirage. The thin, dusty paths snaked through the valleys or along the sides of steep, rocky slopes. They were little more than deer trails, and more than once Geder had found himself wondering if he’d left behind all human habitation, only to find another small, desperate village around the next turning.

  “Can you show me?” Geder asked. “Can one of your men take me there? I’ll pay you with copper.”

  Not that copper would have any effect on these people. Coins meant nothing here more than small, particularly bright stones would have done. His black leather cloak would have more use out here, but he didn’t want to part with it, and besides, no one he’d met since he left the Keshet for the unmarked lands had shown the slightest interest in his offers. He asked out of habit. Because he had always asked before. He had no real hope that they would accept the bargain.

  “Why do you want to go there?” the young man asked.

  “I’m looking for something,” Geder said. “An old place. Very old. It has to do with the dragons.”

  The man licked his lips again, hesitated, and nodded.

  “I know the place you mean,” he said. “Stay here tonight, and I can take you in the morning.”

  “Really?”

  “You want the old temple, yes? Where the holy men live?”

  Geder leaned back. It was the first he had heard about a temple or priests, and his heart sped up. There were stories and references in several of the essays on the fall of the Dragon Empire that talked about pods of sleeping dragons lulled into a permanent sleep and hidden in the far corners of the world. This might be a hidden pod of books, scrolls, legends, and tradition. If he could convince the local priest class to let him read the books, or buy copies… He tried to think what he had to offer for trade.

  “Prince?”

  “What?” Geder said. “Oh, yes. Yes, the old temple. That’s where I’d like to go. Do we have to wait for morning? We could go now.”

  “Morning, sir,” the young man said. “You stay with us tonight.”

  The village boasted two dozen wooden shacks clustered together in a stand of ash. Perhaps a hundred people lived in the dry, quiet squalor. In the high air above them, hawks called and glided, spiraling up toward the sun. Geder had his squire put his tent beside the lakeshore just outside the radius of the village with each of the servants set to keep watch for a part of the night. Not that five servants would be enough to defend him if the locals turned ugly, but if a little warning was the most he could get, he’d take that.

  At sunset, an old woman came to his camp with a bowl of mashed roots with bits of cooked meat in it. He thanked her, gave her a few of his remaining copper coins, and then buried the food without eating a bite. The heat of the day poured up out of the ground, and the chill night air came off the water. Geder lay on his cot, his mind perfectly awake and restless. The long, slow dread waiting for sleep had become the hardest part of his day. The poor food, the mind-killing monotony of the trail, the profound loneliness all grated on him, yes, but in the quiet moments between lying down in the darkness and actual forgetfulness, all the things he was running from seemed to catch up with him.

  He imagined what might have happened back in Camnipol. The conspiracy behind the attempted coup might have been rooted out, hung in the streets. That would have been the best hope. Or maybe another wave of hired swords had come and slaughtered half the court. He wondered whether Jorey Kalliam’s father had given him the same advice that Geder had taken. What part of the world would Jorey have gone to, if he were avoiding the upheaval?

  Geder imagined coming ho
me to a kingdom utterly changed. What if Asterilhold had paid the mercenaries as the first strike of a comprehensive invasion? When Geder turned toward home, there might be no Antea, no Severed Throne, no Rivenhalm. His father might be dead even now.

  Or Klin and his men might have come into favor again. Geder pictured himself riding through the eastern gate only to find guards at the ready to arrest him and throw him into the public gaol. He stood on a platform, looking out over a sea of seared, burned faces—Vanai, killed at his order—before he realized that he was finally slipping down into dream.

  In the morning, the dreams faded and his servants brought him a double handful of dried apples and a tin cup of water. Half a dozen men had congregated at a trailhead. A low cart squatted beside them, loaded with baskets of dried beans and three freshly slaughtered goats. Offerings, apparently, for the temple. The oldest of the men clapped his hands fast and loud, and the others grabbed thick ropes, pulling the cart across the thin dirt. Geder followed on horseback, the only man in the company riding.

  The trail they followed snaked through the hills, clinging to the sides of crevasses and cliffs. The stone itself changed, becoming more jagged and sharp, as if centuries of erosion had failed to soften it. Geder found himself speculating about the relationship of the landscape to the dragon’s roads. Could the same endurance also have been given to the broken land here? Was this what marked the Sinir mountains from those around them?

  The shapes of some stones was peculiarly organic. There were soft, almost graceful curves, and places where the stones seemed to fit together, articulated like bones. In one meadow they passed through, a collection of curved terraces was marked by borders of a pale, porous rock that matched neither the arid desert stones Geder had become used to nor the new, uneven geography. The effect was as if a giant had died there, leaving its ribs in a jumble on the land. Geder looked up and saw the skull.