Wardragon

by Paul Collins

  ‘Bathhouses are everywhere in cities, aren’t they?’ Davit said.

  ‘Actually, no,’ explained Daretor. ‘Besides, the only way to get the stench out of our clothes would be to burn them.’

  ‘I know a bathhouse that opens at odd hours,’ said Zimak. ‘Don’t ask why. We’ll steal some fresh clothes on the way there.’

  ‘I suppose your talents come in handy sometimes,’ Daretor allowed.

  Some time later a bathhouse manager noticed a peculiar and unpleasant odour in his reception parlour. He turned to find a small street urchin holding out several coins.

  ‘Please, sir, my masters need a private bathing room.’

  The manager took the money, bit it to make sure it was not lead covered in gold leaf, and gave the boy a key to chamber number two. It was deplorable how the gentry used street urchins to do their errands, he thought, turning back to his inventory of soap and towels. In his youth, the nobler families all came to the bathhouses with their own retinues or servants. None of this cost-cutting rubbish. People were getting rich these days, he concluded, but money could not buy class or style.

  The bathing chamber was made of stone and marble with brass piping and taps. It had a small fountain in the centre of the main bath from which water steamed and tinkled. As modesty was a convention that differed in different parts of Q’zar, no one blinked when Jelindel peeled off her soiled clothing and walked naked into the deliciously scented water, sinking slowly and luxuriously up to her neck. Daretor undressed last, and fed their soiled and reeking clothes into the furnace at one end of the chamber before climbing down into the water.

  ‘What sort of people come to a bathhouse at night?’ asked Osric.

  ‘Shady characters that attract attention,’ Daretor grumbled.

  Two hours later they stood on the rooftop of their old house, which had been securely boarded up. It was also posted with merchantmen notices declaring them bandits. They felt like bandits, too, dressed in ill-fitting clothes that Zimak had stolen on the way to the bathhouse.

  ‘All our property has been appropriated by the new government,’ read Jelindel, peering at a poster.

  ‘What new government?’ asked Zimak.

  ‘The government of merchantmen,’ said Osric, reading over Jelindel’s shoulder.

  ‘Who just happen to be in the employ of the Preceptor who is actually the Wardragon,’ said Daretor dourly.

  Jelindel wove a spell, frowning slightly as she did so. The heavy brass padlock on the rooftop door clicked open. They entered, pulling the door shut behind them.

  ‘Nobody will suspect that we have returned to live within our own house again,’ she said as they made their way to their old sitting room.

  ‘They will if Zimak lights that pottery lamp,’ said Daretor.

  ‘Then how do we see?’ asked Davit.

  ‘By the bonfires on the city walls,’ said Daretor. ‘Enough light is coming in through the cracks and chinks in the window shutters. Let your eyes adjust, it will be enough.’

  Jelindel had found herself wanting to be alone more and more often, and now that she was confined to the house with Daretor and Zimak, she made for the roof to escape them. The sky was clear, and dominated by the moons. Tiny Specmoon was at the zenith, while Blanchemoon was near full as it rose white and brilliant in the east. Reculemoon was low in the west. It was the trickster in the sky, the moon of accidents and burdens. It had sharp horns as it followed the sun down.

  The trickster is leaving my sky, thought Jelindel. If only my burden would leave me. Specmoon, now, was too small and fleeting for people to rely on. It could not hold back the darkness all by itself. It is my sort of moon, she thought suddenly, nobody depends on Specmoon …

  She went to move back inside to the bedchamber but hesitated at the door when she caught her reflection in a mirror, instinctively feeling annoyed that some young girl had blundered into her presence. The annoyance became shock, then the shock became anger as she realised that she was looking at herself. Jelindel spent little time tending her face, other than to wash it, rub on some oil, and brush back her hair. She thought of herself as someone around thirty, yet now she was staring at her true self, a girl of eighteen. Her features were sharp and lean, pretty yet predatory, foxy rather than endearing. Her hair was tawny and sun-bleached from too much travel and living in the open.

  ‘I like you,’ she said to the image. ‘I would really like to be you.’

  She wondered what sort of life the girl in the mirror was leading. Perhaps her father owned a tavern, and she was working as a serving maid, yet also tallying the takings at the end of each day. A time would come when she would run the tavern herself, because she was bright and hard-working. She thought to marry a soldier one day. This was so that he could stop fights and eject rowdy drunks.

  Exotic coins would appear among the takings of the tavern, and she would overhear plots being plotted and plans being laid. Patrons would talk in riddles, in code, in strange languages, in signs and in gestures. The world would pass through her tavern, and do a little business on the way through. She would see the world without ever having to walk beyond the front door.

  ‘Please don’t let me get any older,’ said Jelindel, putting a hand out to stroke the surface of the mirror. ‘I shall return, very soon. I shall become you, and I shall bring a soldier. We shall marry him, and we shall have our tavern.’

  Jelindel stood in the doorway and for a long time gazed up at the half-disc that was Specmoon, whispering to it like an old friend.

  Having secured the place against unlikely intrusion, they sent Davit and Osric to the night market to buy clothes, food and mild ale. Those two, at least, were not known here. Zimak asked about the possibility of magical masks to give them new faces, but Jelindel shook her head and said there were more important things on which to expend her magic.

  They had a midnight meal after which Daretor drank rainwater from the roof cistern because he considered wine and ale to be fattening. They slept for several hours, then rose while it was still dark. Jelindel went into a trance and her mind entered the paraplane, so that she could search for the fragile threads that were clues to the future. The threads were faint, but she followed them carefully, glimpsing odd clues and symbols of what was probably, to some, worthless information. Eventually, after what seemed like days, she returned to her own paraworld and her own body. To the watchers, who had never grown used to this odd and disconcerting inward journey, it seemed that she had only been meditating for a moment before her body was wrenched by an enormous, convulsive gasp and her eyes bulged open. Her hand groped out to steady herself, and Daretor and Zimak grasped her arms from either side.

  Jelindel’s dizziness abated, and they sat in a circle on the floor of the darkened room. They passed a bottle of wine around, lacking any mugs. Davit insisted that he should have Daretor’s share, but lost interest after tasting the mouth-numbing bitterness.

  ‘Hie, Davit,’ Zimak said, ‘you’ll get used to it.’

  But apart from Zimak’s brief spark of humour, the spirit of the gathering was subdued.

  ‘So what did you learn?’ Daretor asked.

  Jelindel sighed. ‘It’s hard to explain the paraplane to those who cannot go there. The traveller is given glimpses, clues, but all are ambiguous and nothing is fixed, especially where the future is concerned. The fact that I went and looked at the things to come has already changed them. If I went back right now, I would very probably see something different, yet that trip would also change things again. This is what the mystics mean when they say the future is unknowable.’

  ‘Which means …?’ asked Osric.

  ‘I can say that all threads lead to war,’ said Jelindel. ‘A great convergence in the plane on which we live is approaching. A battle lies ahead and in this battle all will be won or lost.’

  ‘It’s the way with battles,’ said Daretor. ‘Someone wins, someone loses, and lots of people die.’

  ‘The outcome?’ asked Osric.<
br />
  ‘Unknowable,’ said Jelindel.

  ‘What was the point then in journeying to this other plane?’ asked Osric, more out of curiosity than disappointment. He for one was used to the utterings of the Sacred One and knew that such things were uncertain.

  ‘We know a battle is coming,’ said Zimak.

  ‘The village idiot could have told you that,’ said Daretor.

  ‘One looks for preponderances,’ explained Jelindel. ‘A weighting this way or that, as well as turning points – those moments when great matters may be shifted by small actions.’

  ‘I see,’ said Osric.

  ‘Well, I’m glad you do,’ said Zimak, ‘because I’m still about as confused as a eunuch in a b –’

  ‘Zimak!’ snapped Jelindel, eyeing Davit.

  ‘Bathhouse?’ suggested the boy.

  ‘This battle that comes will involve many different peoples,’ Jelindel continued. She looked at Osric in the near-darkness. ‘We need the dragons more than ever, this I have seen. We must counterbalance the Wardragon’s ships of the air with flying warriors of our own. Before the battle the dragons must also spread the word of what is to come to the far corners of this land. War comes to Q’zar and we need every able-bodied fighter we can muster. The Wardragon will join forces with Fa’red now that we’ve destroyed most of his fleet. I also sense treachery will have a part in all this.’

  ‘So, you saw more than just a battle,’ Daretor concluded.

  ‘Yes. I suppose I did. Perhaps too much,’ she said cryptically. She smiled at a hidden thought.

  When Daretor quizzed her she explained. ‘I just remembered something you said about Fa’red waiting to pick off the victor. I wondered why he kept his end of the bargain by swapping you and Zimak back to your rightful bodies. He wanted us to be at our greatest possible strength so that we would have a more even battle with the Wardragon.’

  ‘So we’d fight one another to exhaustion,’ Daretor guessed.

  ‘Of all the –’ Zimak began.

  ‘Then again,’ Daretor said, frowning, ‘he looked set to hang us.’

  ‘A ruse to fool the Wardragon into thinking Fa’red really did want us dead?’ Jelindel suggested.

  Zimak laid back, stretching out on the floorboards. ‘Why is it that I always feel like a pawn?’

  In the remaining hours to dawn Daretor did several thousand sit-ups, push-ups and leg squats, and even managed bench presses using Davit as a barbell. Even after only a couple of days back in his own body, he had reduced its weight by several pounds – in spite of the generous ‘gallows’ breakfast – toned the muscles, and even dressed and carried it better. All of which annoyed Zimak immensely.

  Osric left D’loom at mid-morning, making his way out by a conventional gate rather than the sewers, since he was not known in the city, and his head carried no reward. Some time after noon he reached S’cressling, who was disguising herself as part of a rocky outcrop. They were back at the Tower Inviolate by mid-afternoon, and by the next day Osric had recruited a hundred dragons and their riders to fly to every city, drop message leaflets, and generally spread the word about the war to come.

  Before long the rumour of impending war was well established. Everyone whose lives Jelindel and her companions had touched dropped what they were doing and prepared to march on D’loom. They gathered up many more during their trek to the port city.

  Jelindel and the others went about D’loom, mostly at night, meeting with friends, and seeking out those dissatisfied with the city’s current leaders, including those who could be bought or bribed with promissory notes. The Magicians’ Guild was a particularly good source of recruits, being alarmed at the way things were going, and what seemed in store for magic – and their own livelihoods.

  During this time Daretor became aware that Jelindel had become distant.

  She had taken to spending more and more time alone, and shunning his company. At first, he had believed she just needed time to get over her subjectively long stay on Golgora, plus the further shock of Daretor being back in his own body. But he had begun to sense there was more to it than that. His own feelings, he had to admit, were just as confused, and moments of warmth and affection, of coming together in laughter and tears, didn’t seem to heal the distance, and maybe even accentuated it.

  Jelindel was unhappy. And he did not know the cause, and was afraid to ask, in case it had to do with him. Such cowardice shamed him, for he would willingly have faced an angry dragon on her behalf, but he could not face the truth, or what he imagined might be the truth. As her unhappiness increased, so did his.

  The two of them together, Zimak told Davit one day, was pure misery. The rift between his friends was just as painful to Zimak and, strangely enough, made him think of Ethella, so far away, trapped in her bitter lake.

  But he said nothing, and watched his friends closely, even as chaos and death stalked the city.

  It all came to a head in a tavern one evening. Jelindel had disguised herself as Jaelin, her male persona. Against Daretor’s advice she dragged him into the tavern and proceeded to get drunk, insisting that he join her in her insobriety. She had given him a thin disguise also, but he felt that all eyes were on them, and was uncomfortable. Jelindel’s strange behaviour only added to his discomfiture.

  ‘We should go,’ he hissed at her in an undertone.

  Jelindel giggled, now quite drunk. She placed the broken leg of a chair over an empty tankard and magically balanced a full one on the other end. Directly above the whole thing was a ham, hanging from a rope, curing slowly.

  ‘Ah, to what purpose –’ he began before a spell sealed his lips.

  ‘Just this once, Daretor, do be quiet,’ she said, then took his dagger and flung it upwards. The blade severed the cord suspending the ham. The ham fell and struck the ‘empty’ end of the table leg which acted like the arm of a siege engine, sending the full tankard arcing through the air, spilling its entire contents on the head of the burly tapman.

  The man roared in anger. ‘You two!’ he bellowed. ‘I saw that!’

  Other drinkers cleared a path for the furious innkeeper as he stormed across the floor. Seizing the enchantment-bound Daretor and the still laughing Jelindel by their tunics, he dragged them both across the tavern to the door. Kicking it open, he flung first Daretor, then Jelindel, into the darkness outside. A moment later the enchanted bindings fell away from Daretor.

  ‘Why did you do that?’ he demanded.

  ‘Because I wanted to do something clever and funny,’ said Jelindel, brushing the dirt from her clothes.

  ‘I must go back in and restore my honour!’

  ‘How? By killing the tapman?’

  ‘Yes – that is, no. I – ah … Dammit! I don’t understand.’

  ‘Maybe that’s the problem.’

  ‘What? What’s the problem?’

  ‘Something is happening to me, Daretor. Golgora …’ She looked away. ‘It did something to me … It’s like – like when a spell is broken.’

  ‘Are you sick?’

  ‘Perhaps.’ A moment later she said softly, ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me. I wasn’t – myself …’

  ‘Then everything is as before?’ He sounded hopeful.

  ‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’

  Her words stung, and kept Daretor at arm’s length. They trudged on in silence, Jelindel feeling more starkly sober than she ever had.

  A week after their return, their clandestine work paid off. The people of D’loom took back their city. Despite the weakening of magic, the merchantmen could not withstand the combined might of the Magicians’ Guild and the mercenaries hired by several other guilds. Local business had suffered because of the merchantmen, and rich people who are facing the prospect of growing poor are among the most dangerous beings in existence. Besides, the merchantmen were still not fully settled into the running of the city, having come into power less than a fortnight before, and they were taken completely by surprise by the
swiftness with which the rebel force had appeared, and the effectiveness of its leadership.

  Prince Augustus was located in a dungeon, and was swiftly restored as a figurehead. The prince was so grateful at being released from his dank cell that he appointed Daretor as War Commander of D’loom. The position was newly invented, which meant that Daretor could do what he liked as long as the prince’s bath and dinner were not interrupted.

  D’loom quickly became a city gearing for war.

  It was strange, Daretor reflected, how the merchantmen’s efforts to supplant magic with cold science had not only depressed the markets but had somehow dispirited the townsfolk as well, as if a vital part of their being had been stifled. Of course, it hadn’t helped that many locals had left to work in the Argentian mines. But with the restrictions of the merchantmen gone, many would hopefully return. The streets were already buzzing. Guards, watchmen, militia and ordinary townsfolk drilled, practised and worked on the defences. The workshops of the blacksmiths were frantically busy, belching sparks and black smoke as weapons of war were fashioned. The sound of hammers on metal rang throughout the city as did the cries of the men drilling with sword, pike and crossbow. The markets also bustled with activity. Weapons and armour were being produced courtesy of the royal treasury, but anxious citizens were laying in food and wine against the threat of a long siege. Prices doubled, then tripled.

  All the while Daretor ate and drank minimally, but exercised a great deal. The city was administered while he did sit-ups, and his meagre meals were snatched between sword practice and readying the city for war. The warrior began to look considerably more like his old self. Quite a lot of interest was taken in Daretor by women who had known his body while Zimak had lived within it. Daretor knew that Jelindel noticed this and it bothered him that she did not become jealous.

  One night, Jelindel contrived to be alone with Daretor. The coolness that had grown between them since Golgora – and maybe before that, if truth be told – had become a kind of careful civility, which separated them more effectively than any rage or petty argument might have done. Jelindel, feeling lonely and mad at herself for having allowed things to get to this point, sought out Daretor in a palace hall where he stood with a handful of throwing knives, flinging them at the head of a human-sized target with inhuman skill.