The Dragon’s Path

by Abraham Daniel

  “What’s the matter, Father?”

  “We have a visitor. You should come with me.”

  Geder rose to his feet, alarm tightening his skin. Basrahip looked from the doorway to Geder and back.

  “Stay here,” Geder said. “I’ll come back as soon as I can.”

  Lerer walked in silence through the halls. The servants, usually buzzing through the rooms like bees in a meadow, were gone. At the door to the private meeting chamber, he stopped. For a moment, Geder thought he would speak, but instead he shook his head, opened the door, and stepped in.

  The private chamber had been designed for comfort. Candles glowed from polished silver sconces, doubling their light and filling the room with the scents of honey and heat. A fire grate sat unlit and soot-blackened in its corner. Light spilled from the western window, and the pale silk chairs caught it, seeming almost to glow. A boy in a grey tunic looked up at him solemnly, and Geder felt he should have recognized the face. On the far wall, a huge painting the size of a standing man showed a green-scaled dragon towering above figures representing the thirteen races of man. And looking up at the painting, King Simeon.

  The king turned.

  Lerer bowed and said, “Your Majesty.” Geder bowed a moment later, quickly and with the sense of trying to catch up. The boy was the prince. Prince Aster and King Simeon.

  “I am pleased to meet you at last, Geder Palliako,” the king said. Geder took the use of his given name as permission to stand.

  “I… Um, thank you. It’s a pleasure to meet you too, Majesty.”

  “You are aware that tradition calls for the prince to be taken in by a house of the highest reputation and nobility. A family that will swear to protect him should the need arise.”

  “Ah,” Geder said. “Yes?”

  “I have come to ask you to fill this role.”

  “My father, you mean? Our house?”

  “It’s not me he wants,” Lerer said. “It’s you.”

  “I… I don’t know how to raise a boy. All respect, Your Majesty. I wouldn’t have the first idea what to do.”

  “Keep him safe,” the king said. His voice didn’t sound commanding. It didn’t sound formal. It sounded like a man on the edge of begging or prayer. “Just keep him safe.”

  “Right now everyone in court loves you or fears you, my boy,” Lerer said. “Half of them are saying you’re the first hero Antea’s seen in a generation, and the other half won’t mention you for fear of drawing your attention. I’m not sure it’s a good reason to take the title of protector.”

  “I’m not doing it,” Geder said. “I’m no one’s protector. It’d be you, Father. You’re the Viscount of Rivenhalm.”

  “But you are the Baron of Ebbinbaugh,” King Simeon said.

  “Ebbinbaugh?” Geder said.

  “Someone has to take Maas’s holdings,” Lerer said. “Seems that’s you.”

  “Well,” Geder said, a grin spreading across his lips. “Well.”

  Prince Aster rose and walked to Geder. He wasn’t a large boy. Geder had always thought he was taller. He had the gray eyes and serious face of the dead queen, but his father’s jaw.

  “I owe you my life, Lord Palliako,” the boy said. The cadence of his voice made the phrases sound rehearsed. “I would be pleased to have you as my protector, and swear that I should do honor to you as your ward.”

  “Do you want to?” Geder asked. The boy’s formal expression faltered. Tears appeared, glistening in his eyes.

  “They say I can’t stay with Da anymore,” he said.

  Geder felt himself starting to tear up as well.

  “I lost my mother when I was young too,” he said. “Maybe I could be like an uncle? Or an older brother.”

  “I don’t have any brothers,” Aster said.

  “See? Neither do I,” Geder said. Aster tried to smile. “We’d probably need to visit your father a lot, though. And mine. God, am I going to have my own holding? Father, I’m going to have my own holding.”

  “You will,” Lerer said. “I think his majesty didn’t want to be the only one in the room losing a son.”

  Geder barely heard him. This morning, he’d been a hero. Now he had a barony of his own and a place in court that men fought and sometimes died to get. Sir Alan Klin would soil himself when he heard that he’d made an enemy of Prince Aster’s protector.

  “Thank you, Your Majesty. I accept this duty and honor, and I’ll make sure Aster’s kept safe. I swear it.”

  The king was weeping, tears streaking down his cheeks, but his voice didn’t waver when he spoke.

  “I put my trust in you, Lord Palliako. I will… I will make the announcement at the close of court. I’ll see you’re seated appropriately for your new station. This is a brighter day for the kingdom. And I thank you for that.”

  Geder bowed. He wanted to run out in the streets, capering and singing. He wanted to go brag to all of his friends, starting with Jorey Kalliam and…

  “Can I borrow the prince?” Geder asked. “Just for a few minutes? There’s someone I want him to meet.”

  In the sitting room, Basrahip had moved to Geder’s chair. The huge hands turned the pages slowly, the broad face twisted with disdain. Geder cleared his throat. The priest looked up, his eyes shifting from Geder to the prince standing at his side.

  “Basrahip, high priest of the goddess, may I introduce my new ward Prince Aster. Prince Aster, this is Basrahip.”

  The prince walked forward, stopped the appropriate distance away, and bowed his small head. He looked like a kitten greeting a bull.

  “I am very pleased to meet you, sir,” the prince said.

  Basrahip smiled.

  “No,” he said, softly. “You aren’t. But give it time, young prince. Give it time.”

  extras

  meet the author

  Kyle Zimmerman

  DANIEL ABRAHAM is the author of the critically acclaimed Long Price Quartet. He has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards, and won the International Horror Guild award. He also writes as MLN Hanover and (with Ty Franck) James S. A. Corey. He lives in New Mexico. Find out more about the author at www.danielabraham.com.

  interview

  The Dragon’s Path marks the beginning of a new epic fantasy project for you. What was the impulse behind this project, and how was it different from the other books you’ve written?

  Actually, that’s kind of a hard question. The impulse behind a project isn’t something I can really describe. You know, apart from saying that it seemed nifty. But I can talk about the approach. That was very different from what I’ve done before.

  How so?

  Well, the last epic fantasy—or second world fantasy or however we want to talk about it—was my first big book, essentially. I wanted to do something different and novel, no pun intended. And I wanted to learn how to write book-length fiction. I’d done a lot of short stories, and I felt pretty comfortable with that length, but novels were a different beast.

  That’s interesting. We should get back to that, but tell me a little about the novelty. What do you mean by that?

  I mean, I wanted to do something that people hadn’t seen before. I wanted an epic fantasy without much violence. I wanted to tell a few people’s stories over the span of their whole lives. I wanted to set it someplace that wasn’t a medieval Europe analogue. I wanted to write something that was different. And I did, and I’m proud of it. But part of what I learned is that different is easy in a way I hadn’t expected. And I started getting interested in something else. I started thinking about how to take elements that are maybe more familiar and remake them. That’s not quite right. I don’t mean take out hoary old tropes and shine them up. I mean, go to what makes epic fantasy epic fantasy—find the genre’s strength—and really engage with it.

  How did you go about that?

  Well, back in 2007 I arranged a conversation. A friend of mine has a place just outside Santa Fe with a really nice living room that look
s out over the desert, and she let me have kind of a party there. I called it my symposium. We had George R. R. Martin and S. M. Stirling and Walter Jon Williams and Melinda Snodgrass and a few others—a lot of the local folks—and basically we sat around all day talking about what epic fantasy is and does. Where it gets its juice. I have something like four or five hours of recordings from that. I took what we said there and I turned it over in my head until I really understood what my opinions were. And that was the start of The Dagger and the Coin.

  That sounds like a fascinating day. Was there a consensus? Did everyone there have more or less the same opinion on the subject?

  Not exactly, no. But there were points that were pretty widely agreed on. Epic fantasy has a lot to do with nostalgia. There’s that sense of looking back at a golden age, and a lot of the time with a sense of loss. Tolkien came up a lot. Pretty much everything since The Lord of the Rings has been written in imitation of or reaction against The Lord of the Rings. But it also has to do with how the story relates to nature, and whether the world is essentially benign.

  The biggest thing that I took away from it, though, is that epic fantasy—and maybe this is true for all literature—but epic fantasy is a conversation. Without Tolkien, you don’t have Terry Brooks, but you also don’t have Stephen Donaldson. Without Donaldson and the rise of the antihero in fantasy, you probably don’t have A Song of Ice and Fire. In a way, that gave me permission.

  Permission for what, exactly?

  Permission to react, I guess. Permission to be part of a greater body of literature than just what I’m doing right here. That sounds pretentious, doesn’t it? How about this: it gave me permission to take the things I love best and use them. So, for instance, I have a real fascination with medieval banking. There’s a book called Medici Money by Tim Parks I’ve read a half dozen times. So I grabbed that. And I thought about Dorothy Dunnett’s House of Niccolo books and George’s Ice and Fire books and all the adventure stories I grew up with. By talking about the things that unify the genre, I sort of loosened up about celebrating them. I thought about what it felt like to read David Eddings when I was fourteen, and get back to the things that would do that for me at forty. If that makes sense.

  You were talking before about writing novels as being different than short fiction. You’ve written a lot of short stories in your career. How do they differ from the longer work?

  Well, the short stories tend to be weirder than the books. They’re very different forms. There are stories that just pop in thirty pages that would lay there like yesterday’s fish at three hundred. I’d say I probably do more experimental, difficult-to-categorize short stories and then use the books to apply what I learned there.

  You have a long history, I understand, of working in writers’ workshops. You attended Clarion West in 1998. You are a frequent participant at the Rio Hondo workshop in Taos. You were in a critique group in New Mexico for almost a decade. How much do you think that kind of experience helps writers?

  For as much time as I’ve put in them and as much benefit as I’ve gotten from them, I’m actually still a little leery about them. If you get a good one, it’s invaluable. I have no doubt at all that I came out of Clarion West and Rio Hondo and the local crit group better than when I went in. But there’s the ones you didn’t talk about too. I took a bunch of creative writing classes in college that I don’t think did much. I was in a couple groups before that weren’t much use, and were really probably counterproductive. A workshop depends on the people in it. Good people are great. Lousy people are perhaps less great, right?

  introducing

  If you enjoyed

  THE DRAGON’S PATH,

  look out for

  THE KING’S BLOOD

  Book Two of The Dagger and the Coin

  by Daniel Abraham

  CAPTAIN MARCUS WESTER

  Sometime, centuries before, someone had built a low wall along the top of the rise. In the moonlight, the scattered rocks reminded Marcus of knucklebones. He knelt, one hand on the dew-slick grass. In the cove below him, three ships rested at anchor. Shallow-bottomed with paired masts. Faster and more maneuverable than the round-bellied trade ships that they hunted. One showed a mark on the side where she’d been struck not too many weeks before, the new timber of the patch bright and unweathered.

  On the sand, a cookfire still burned, its orange glow the only warmth in the early autumn night. From where they stood, Marcus counted a dozen structures—more than tents, less than huts—scattered just above the tide line. A well-established camp, then. That was good. A half dozen stretched-leather boats rested near the water.

  Yardem Hane grunted softly and pointed a wide hand to the east. A tree a hundred feet or so from the water towered up toward the sky. A glimmer, moonlight on metal, less than a third of the way to its tip showed where the sentry perched. Marcus pointed out at the ships. High in the rigging of the one nearest the shore, another dark figure.

  Yardem held up two fingers, wide brows rising in question. Two watchers?

  Marcus shook his head, holding up a third finger. One more.

  The pair sat still in the shadows made darker by the spray of fallen stone. The moon shifted slowly in its arc. The movement was subtle. A single branch on the distant tree that moved in the breeze more slowly. Marcus pointed. Yardem flicked an ear silently; he wore no earrings when they were scouting. Marcus looked over the cove one last time, cataloging it as best he could. They faded back down the rise, into the shadows. They walked north, and then west. They didn’t speak until they’d traveled twice as far as their low voices would carry.

  “How many do you make out?” Marcus asked.

  Yardem spat thoughtfully.

  “Not more than seventy, sir,” he said.

  “That’s my count too.”

  The path was hardly more than a deer trail. Thin spaces in the trees. It wouldn’t be many weeks before the freshly dried leaves of autumn fell, but tonight their steps were muffled by well-rotted litter and a summer’s soft moss. The moon was no more than a scattering of pale dapples in the darkness under the leaves.

  “We could go back to Porte Oliva,” Yardem said. “Raise a hundred men. Maybe a ship.”

  “That’s possible.”

  In the brush, a small animal skittered, fleeing before them as if they were a fire.

  “The one farthest from shore was riding lower than the others,” Marcus said.

  “Was.”

  “We come in with a ship, they’ll see us. It’ll be empty water by the time we’re there.”

  Yardem was quiet apart from a small grunt when his head bumped against a low branch. Marcus kept his eyes on the darkness, not really seeing. His legs shifted and moved easily. His mind gnawed at the puzzle.

  “If they see us coming on land,” he said, “they haul out boats and wave to us from the sea. We trap them on land in a fair fight with the men we have now, they have numbers and territory on us. We wait to get more sword-and-bows, and they may have moved on.”

  “Difficult, sir.”

  “Ideas?”

  “Hire on for an honest war.”

  Marcus chuckled.

  His soldiers were camped dark, but the sound of their voices and the smells of their food traveled in the darkeness. He had fifty men of several races—otter-pelted Kurtadae, black-chitined Timzinae, Firstblood. Even half a dozen bronze-scaled Jasuru hired on at the last minute when their contract as house guards fell through. It made for more tension in the camp, but the usual racial slurs were absent. They were Kurtadae and Timzinae and Jasuru, not clickers and roaches and pennies. And no one said a bad word about the Firstblood when one of them would decide who dug the latrines.

  And, to the point, the mixture gave Marcus options.

  Ahariel Akkabrian had been one of the first guards when the Porte Oliva branch of the Medean bank had been a high-stakes gamble with all odds against. His pelt was half a shade greyer now, especially around his mouth and back, but the beads wove
n into it were silver instead of glass. He sat up on his cot as Marcus ducked into the tent. His eyes were bleary with sleep, but his voice was crisp.

  “Captain Wester, sir. Yardem.”

  “Sorry to wake you,” Yardem said.

  “Ahariel,” Marcus said. “How long could you swim in the sea?”

  “Me, you mean, sir? Or someone like me?”

  “Kurtadae.”

  “Long as you’d like.”

  “No boasting. It’s past summer. The water’s cold. How long?”

  Ahariel yawned deeply and shook his head, setting the beads to clicking.

  “The dragons built us for water, Captain. The only people who can swim longer and colder than we can are the Drowned, and they can’t fight for shit.”

  Marcus closed his eyes, seeing the moonlit cove again. The ships at anchor, the shelters, the hide boats. The coals of the fire glowing. He had eleven Kurtadae, Ahariel included. If he sent them into the water, that left a bit over thirty left. Against twice that number. Marcus bit his lip and looked up at his second in command. In the light of the single candle, Yardem looked placid. Marcus cleared his throat.

  “The day you throw me in a ditch and take control of the company?”

  “Not today, sir,” Yardem said.

  “Afraid you’d say that. Only one thing to do then. Ahariel? You’re going to need some knives.”

  Marcus rode to the west, shield slung on his back and sword at his side. The sun rose behind him, pushing his shadow out ahead like a gigantic version of himself. To his left, the sea was bright as beaten gold. The sentry tree was just in sight. The poor bastard on duty would be squinting into the brightness. The danger, of course, being that he wouldn’t look at all. If Marcus managed an actual surprise attack, they were doomed. He had the uncomfortable sense that God’s sense of humor went along lines very much like that.