by Paul Collins
She brought the craft down into the town square. Ras climbed out and strode for the main ziggurat. Some of those present ran, others cowered, and a few brave souls came forward to see what was happening. When it became clear that instant death was not about to be inflicted upon them, their nerves strengthened, and a cautious crowd gathered.
Jelindel waited a reasonable amount of time before demolishing a section of wall that Ras had earlier indicated. She then lifted the vessel to hover slightly out of bowshot over the town. From this height they could see large numbers of people spilling out of the ziggurats and adjacent buildings. An hour after letting Ras out, the control panel’s voice informed them that a message had come in from Ras. The buildings had been cleared.
Jelindel manipulated several control studs. The north-west structure appeared on a screen on the panel in front of her. A glowing target sight shifted across the screen and stopped on the nearest wall of the building.
‘Lock on to the highlighted images, then fire,’ said Jelindel.
‘You’re sure about this?’ replied a feminine voice. Its former melodious tone was now suffused with concern.
‘Yes.’
‘I sense a reluctance. Perhaps you are a newly qualified gunnery officer. Quick neural information dumps can sometimes cause … Do you know what sort of mess my energies can make?’
‘Destroy the place!’ shouted Jelindel. ‘Can’t you understand orders?’
‘Affirmative. Target acquired,’ said the ship.
Daretor glanced about nervously each time the ship spoke. He was known to speak to his sword on occasion, especially on one recent night when he had become exceptionally drunk, but even then he never expected a reply, and he certainly never thought that it might fly out of his hands and do its own fighting. It wasn’t natural. Perhaps the ship was simply possessed by a daemon. These cold science people didn’t know everything.
‘Life signs?’ Jelindel asked.
‘None,’ came the reply.
‘Fire.’
Brilliant green pulses of atom-annihilating energy blasted the ziggurat. One entire side glowed violet for a second, then vaporised.
The towers and buildings highlighted by Jelindel were blasted into rubble without further doubt from the thundercast controller. Soon there was nothing left standing, and indeed when the smoke and dust cleared there was a large crater where the basement complex had collapsed in on itself. Argentia at least would provide the Wardragon no further assistance.
Struck numb by the craft’s power, Daretor could only watch the destruction with his mouth hanging open, the hilt of his sword feeling more like a toy with every passing second.
By the time Jelindel brought the craft back to land in the town square the wind had blown away the smoke and dust. A group of townsfolk, with Ras at their head, was waiting as Jelindel and Daretor climbed out of the craft. When they approached, Daretor noticed that Ras had an odd expression on his face, almost one of sadness. Jelindel started to ask if all had gone well, but before she had finished her question, blue light flickered out from over Ras’s shoulder and enveloped both her and Daretor, binding them in magical cords.
‘Do not bother with any of your spells, Countess,’ said a voice. ‘I have muffled your magical voice by clamping your jaw. You’ll find it difficult to manifest so much as a smile, let alone one of your interesting little spells.’
A cowled man stepped out from behind Ras. Jelindel now saw that Ras was shackled, a sword pressed into his back by a frightened-looking militiaman. Fa’red threw back his cowl. ‘This is well met,’ he said, grinning.
While Jelindel frantically tried to utter a spell, Daretor cried, ‘We had a pact!’
‘So we did, Zimak – or is it Daretor? I can never tell. However, you broke our pact when you failed to report back what you had discovered here. Now you have destroyed my buildings.’
‘Your buildings?’ Daretor exclaimed.
‘I took the liberty, while you were both away, of appropriating the Wardragon’s base here. I discovered many interesting things, especially cold science things. I could not understand or control them, but then that is what folk like these are for. They can command mighty forces, but they are still weak where magic is concerned. They work for me now. And not the mailshirt.’
‘I cannot believe that.’
‘No? Think on it: the most highly trained warrior with the most advanced weapons imaginable can be persuaded to leave his post by some ignorant strumpet who flashes a shapely leg at him. Magic is like that, too. It sneaks up under one’s guard.’
Fa’red said all this with the profound distaste of the mage-born for cold science.
‘Then you should know that the Preceptor has a fleet of these metal flying carpets,’ Daretor replied, inclining his head to the vessel they had stolen. ‘We figure he’s on his way here now with what’s left.’
‘And where would he build such a fleet?’
‘On Golgora,’ said Daretor.
Fa’red stared at them both for a moment then burst out laughing.
‘On Golgora? The hell world? So let me see, he went to Golgora and built a mine and got together a group of folk with cold science skills so far beyond his understanding that he would be hard pressed to use their toilet without written instructions. He then built a fleet of sky vessels – on one of the most dangerous paraworlds ever charted? Full of ignorant, exiled villains, cutthroats and murderers, who just stood happily by while he did this?’
‘No, he enslaved them.’
‘Your tongue has become quite resourceful,’ Fa’red said. ‘And I suppose he sent them in chains to some university of the cold sciences to acquire an education.’
‘You’re missing the point,’ said Daretor. ‘He’s no longer the Preceptor, or so I’m told. He’s now the Wardragon, and has been for some time.’
This checked Fa’red for a moment.
‘The mailshirt,’ he said. ‘The mailshirt … I wonder.’
‘What they say is correct,’ said Ras in his imperturbable tone.
Fa’red eyed him with frank curiosity. ‘A new player, how interesting. Well, you can all die together.’ Aware of Jelindel’s propensity to thwart him, he conferred a secondary magic-suppressing spell on her, while allowing her full use of her jaw again.
He then briskly issued orders. Guards once loyal to the Preceptor came forward to take hold of Jelindel and Daretor as the binding spells were collapsed, then they and Ras were shackled, hauled away, and locked in a cell.
That evening their wrist shackles alone were removed and they were given a meal. They were also informed they would be publicly executed early the next morning. Ras was taken away for questioning and did not return.
‘You hardly touched your food,’ Jelindel pointed out as they sat on opposite sides of the cell. She spoke slowly, as Fa’red’s spell enforced a kind of censorship on her utterances.
‘Trying to lose weight,’ replied Daretor.
‘This is becoming farcical,’ muttered Jelindel, straining to open her mouth. ‘Q’zar is about to be destroyed and all Fa’red can think about is revenge. The dolt! Does he think the Wardragon will sit down and parley with him?’
Daretor yawned. ‘He might. If Taggar is successful in destroying the flying fleet on Golgora, then he may feel in need of a new ally.’
‘There’s some truth in that, but how stupid would Fa’red be to trust the Wardragon? This is a battle between magic and cold science. Does he think the Wardragon will destroy all else and permit one mage – Fa’red – to go on his merry way?’
Daretor raised a single eyebrow, then smiled enigmatically. ‘Others look for strengths and weaknesses in their enemies, but I look for patterns. Take any battle, and Fa’red will be there, waiting on the sidelines, waiting for someone to win, waiting to swoop in and annihilate the weary victor. He’s really a very simple man. Clever, learned, and powerful, to be sure, but at heart quite simple. He wants wealth and power, and he tries to get it by stealing victor
ies from victors. We must have forces in reserve for when he appears, so that we can strike him down forever.’
Jelindel thought about his words, at first frowning with disbelief, then slowly, almost reluctantly, nodding.
Now it came home to Daretor what was at stake here. Like most Q’zarans, he had grown up with magic, had taken it for granted perhaps. Even when he had hated and distrusted it, he still could not imagine life without it; it was one of those great ‘givens’, like breathing and sleeping. Indeed, in some ways, it was like the darkness that came every night: always there, always scary, yet oddly comforting in the rhythms of its return, in the sweet sleep it brought with it, and in the resurrection of each new day.
As he thought about what the loss of magic would mean, and remembered the sight of the great human machine with its conveyor belt mentality, he shivered.
‘Cold science naturally displaces magic, just as heat pushes out cold, or disbelief holds sway over belief. They cannot live together,’ Jelindel said.
‘Yet they do so within the Wardragon,’ said Daretor.
Jelindel stared at him. ‘Yes, they do,’ Jelindel agreed. ‘That’s the Wardragon’s strength, its secret weapon. But now I wonder. Perhaps that is also its weakness.’
‘If it has a weakness.’
‘When I met it in the fortress on Golgora, I sensed something. I’m not sure what. When it saw me it seemed … confused. Is that possible? Could a machine feel that? Could it feel at all?’
‘Why did it want you?’ Daretor asked.
‘I wondered at that, too,’ said Jelindel. ‘I think it wanted revenge. But then … well, Taggar thinks it let me go. He never said why.’
Daretor snorted. ‘If it let you go, then it did so for its own purposes.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Jelindel, more mystified than ever. ‘But what can we know of its purposes?’
‘Nothing. And I for one don’t want to know. I am more concerned about what is going to happen here. To us. And to magic.’ He paused. ‘Could magic truly be destroyed?’
Jelindel told him about her foretelling with Cimone, then said, ‘Other worlds that once were magical, now are riddled by cold science. We’ve seen them.’
‘Farvane?’
‘Yes. The Farvenu are agents, witting or otherwise, of this manic force that detests and fears magic, the inheritance of the God-king Chiron, according to Taggar. It seems to me a disease that spreads, a cancer, that eats away the healthy flesh. Taggar says that as more and more cold science is introduced, magic gradually stops working. People stop believing. After a while, they can no longer even imagine magic. And thus magic dies. If that happens here –’
‘Then your prophecy will come true.’
‘Yes. My prophecy of a thousand years of darkness. It will be a thousand years unrelieved by magic. The people will be more defenceless than I had guessed possible. There will be no magical cures, no knowledge spread by magic, no power to defend themselves and their communities. All the things that can stave off tyranny will be gone; the plane of shadows itself that connects all people and makes them greater than they are alone, will fragment and fall into the darkness I saw. Only the evils of cold science – sickness, madness, and injustice – will remain.’
‘But we too have some of these things.’
‘It will be much, much worse under cold science. And remember, magic is still new to Q’zar, for all that it is five thousand years old. It is yet to come into its own, to fully mature. Now that would be something to see! But perhaps that is not to be.’ She paused. ‘If the Wardragon wins, then magic will become a myth. Even the dragons will be gone.’
‘Is that so bad?’
‘How can you say that, you, who have ridden on dragons?’
‘Don’t get me wrong, I value the dragons greatly, but at least cold science vessels don’t eat their passengers.’
‘Name a dragon that ever tried to eat you.’
‘I can’t, but how do I know they are not wondering how I would taste toasted?’
‘Zimak, dragons are the very stuff of magic. The first and oldest magic …’ She stopped and tapped her head. ‘Silly me. You’re having a lend of me.’
‘You’ve become very serious of late.’
Jelindel heaved a sigh. ‘I know. Do you think Daretor managed to enlist the Sacred One’s help?’
Daretor had almost forgotten his – now Zimak’s – mission to the Tower Inviolate. But he did not like to think about it. There was no chance that a petty street thief like Zimak, who possessed as much honour as a Nerrissian sewer rat, could have obtained the help of the Sacred One. But he did not say so. Hope was as much an endangered species right now as magic. ‘Perhaps he did,’ he said, reminding her that the dragons might yet come. Jelindel saw that he was not convinced, but nodded anyway.
‘Let’s hope Daretor’s been successful,’ Jelindel said, though there was an odd note to her voice that Daretor could not quite interpret.
A short time later a guard came by and removed not only their used dinner implements but the lamp as well. He told them, ‘Better get some shut-eye. It’ll be your last.’ He thought this to be hysterically funny, and walked off cackling to himself.
They lay together in the darkness on the joined single beds and Jelindel put her arms around Daretor. He hardly noticed it anymore. He supposed that people who were about to die had a right to some kind of intimacy. Nobody wanted to die alone.
Jelindel leaned across and kissed him on the lips. Daretor was not sure whether he was annoyed or confused, or both. Was Jelindel showing affection to him, Daretor, or to Zimak? As far as she was concerned, she had kissed Zimak in Daretor’s body. Did that mean he had been half-betrayed? Had she always fancied Zimak? Did she now want to consummate a long-stifled passion?
‘Zimak?’
‘Hmm?’
‘None of this is easy for me, either.’ Jelindel waited for Daretor to say something. When he didn’t, she continued. ‘I’ve lived as a battle-hardened adult these past five years. I should have been playing in the walled garden with my friends, and longing to grow up and be taken seriously. While I was riding in the wilderness, fighting for my life and casting spells, normal girls were having fun, learning to do tatting, to sew, and how to supervise cooks and servants. I was never taught how to dance properly. All girls are taught to dance, but not me. I just picked up a few steps here and there.’ A slight rasp entered her voice. ‘Instead I am as you see me, hero, wizard, adventurer, but neither normal nor a girl.’
‘Of course you’re a girl.’
‘I’m female, not a girl. Soon I shall be female, but not a woman. I’ll certainly not be a lady nor noblewoman.’
‘You’re alive. That must count for something.’
‘I wonder. I just want to be who and what I should be, not what circumstances have made me.’
‘All right, you have my leave to dress in frills and lace, and be a countess,’ Daretor mumbled, half-wishing she would stop talking.
‘Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like if my family had … lived.’ She turned over. He heard a single choked sob in the darkness and dearly wanted to put his arms around her, but was afraid she would let him.
Angry at himself Daretor dozed and dreamed he was standing at one end of a corridor while Zimak was at the other. Running between them, utterly bewildered, was Jelindel. Zimak kept swapping faces with him, and so swiftly that Daretor couldn’t tell who Jelindel was actually trying to reach. Finally, exhausted, she stopped equidistant from them and sank to her knees. She started scratching at the corridor wall, as if she could dig her way out with her fingernails.
The scratching irritated Daretor and he asked her to stop but she kept right on doing it.
He woke and sat bolt upright. The scratching was real and came from the barred window set high in the far wall. Daretor climbed to his feet and shuffled warily over, the manacles on his ankles restricting his movements. The window was too high to peer out of so he dragged over
the crate they had used as a table the night before and climbed up on it, gripping the bars of the window.
‘Is somebody there?’ he hissed.
‘Zimak?’ came a small voice.
It took Daretor a moment to realise the speaker meant him. ‘Yes, it’s me. Who’s this?’
‘It’s Davit.’
‘Davit?’ Daretor gathered his wits. ‘Yes, Davit. What are you doing here?’
‘I saw them arrest you yesterday. I’m here to get you out.’
Daretor had no idea who this Davit was, but he was not about to ignore an offer of help, even from a friend of Zimak’s.
‘What is your plan?’ Daretor asked.
‘I’ve stolen two of my father’s chisels. We can try to dig out one of the bars.’
A small hand holding a chisel came through the window. Daretor took the tool and together they got to work on one of the bars. Behind Daretor, Jelindel woke. When she found out what they were doing she went to the cell door and stayed there with her ear pressed against the wood, listening for any sounds of approaching guards.
The bars were set deep in large stone slabs and the mortar was like old rock itself. They chiselled away for hours, their noise muffled by distant banging, which Jelindel suggested was a gallows in the making. By dawn they had only succeeded in loosening the base of one bar.
As the light increased, Daretor got a good look at his helper. Davit was a small boy of about nine or ten, slight of build, with a mop of untidy, dark hair and a squint in one eye that he accentuated by tilting his head to one side.
Finally, Daretor stopped. His fingers were rubbed raw and blood had mixed with the chips of mortar. ‘It’s no use,’ he said. ‘I thank you for your help, Davit, but you must go now, before it gets too light.’
‘No! I want to get you out of there.’ There were tears in the boy’s eyes.
Daretor put his hand on Davit’s.
‘There’s nothing more you can do. And if you’re found here, you will end up joining us on the scaffold.’ He pushed the chisel back through the window and watched as the boy took it morosely and shoved it in his canvas bag.