Silver Dragon Codex

by R. D. Henham

  “Fine, just fine, that’s settled, then.” Worver tossed a look back over his shoulder. Hautos was hefting Ebano, pitching him face first over his bull-sized shoulder with a snort. Worver smiled sweetly. “Hautos, you know what to do?” He stepped aside, hand on the minotaur’s shoulder, and gave him some whispered directions. The smooth smile never left the ringmaster’s face.

  The minotaur snorted deprecatingly, little shots of steam whistling past the big brass ring in his nose. He carried Ebano off, glowering at anyone brave enough to take even a single step to follow. Worver led Belen and Mysos into his wagon as the crowd slowly began to disperse, uneasy whispers floating among the performers.

  “Oh, Jace.” Cerisse wiped at her face with a sleeve, leaving a dirty smudge along her cheekbone. “We can’t let her sign those papers! If she does, that horrible Worver will have won, and Belen will literally be his slave. She’ll belong to the circus like some sort of property!”

  “Yeah, and who says that he’ll only use her for the circus? With a dragon on his side, Worver could do a lot worse—and use the circus to cover up all the things he does. This is awful.”

  “Can’t we go in there and stop it?”

  “No. Not until Ebano’s all right.” Jace sighed. “Belen knows that this is the only chance Ebano has to be healed. We’ve got to follow Hautos, help Ebano, and then come back and save her.”

  “Then we’d better do it fast. Belen will keep her word. She’s too good a person to break it, even if Worver’s a stinking cheat.” Cerisse bit her lip. “So what do we do?”

  Gloomy and angry, Jace thumbed over his shoulder. “We follow Hautos. If he can’t heal Ebano, then the whole thing’s off and I’m going to go right into that wagon and tell Mysos everything—no matter what happens to me.”

  “Jace!” Cerisse’s faded smile regained a bit of its certainty. “You’d do that? But it’s dangerous—Worver wouldn’t think twice about killing you. He didn’t hesitate to throw us in that cage.”

  “I don’t care.” Jace’s stomach sank a bit. Cerisse was right. Despite the fact that he’d been brave—they’d all been brave!—against the werewolves, the chimera, and a hundred little dangers along the way, this was different. Heroes didn’t get blackmailed.

  “You must really care about Belen.” The little dirt smudge on Cerisse’s cheek had grown larger, a brush of damp brown dust against her lightly tanned skin. “I think it’s great that she has a friend like you, Jace, who would go through so much to help her out. No matter what, you’re there for her. You always have been.”

  “You did the same thing.” He tried to keep the minotaur in sight, waiting until the beast was several steps away before he started moving. “You went with us to protect her and help her out. That’s what good friends do.”

  “I wasn’t—” Cerisse stopped and shook her head. “What I’m trying to say is that I hope … well, I hope that everything works out for both of you, Jace.”

  “It will, I promise. No matter what Worver tries, we’ll find a way to stop him. Look! Hautos ducked behind the sharpshooter game.” Jace pointed. “We’d better hurry.”

  Cerisse looked away. “Yeah, we’d better catch up before he has a chance to do anything despicable. I don’t trust that minotaur.” Jace nodded, and they trotted quickly after the strongman. Hautos was easy to track—he didn’t bother to skulk, and he was far too big to hide behind anything smaller than an elephant or a fully loaded wagon. He walked through the circus, away from the big top, toward the wagons that usually held the stores and extra tent canvases. “Where is he going?”

  Jace squinted. “Not toward any of the herbalists, that’s for sure. Duck!” They jumped behind one of the many-spoked wheels of a large wagon. The minotaur swung his heavy head back and forth, looking around for witnesses. He shuffled Ebano over his shoulder, evoking a soft groan from the wounded man, and then strode directly toward a small, shabby-looking wagon off to the side. While they watched, Hautos reached for a big brass key at his belt and unlocked a heavy wooden door at the rear of the wagon. After opening it, he tossed Ebano inside with a callousness that made Jace wince. After another scathing look around the wagon, the minotaur climbed inside. “Jace, look! The wagon didn’t move when he climbed inside.”

  “So?”

  Cerisse rolled her eyes. “You may be a tightrope walker, but I guess you don’t know anything about balancing. If something as big and heavy as a minotaur climbs on one end of a tightrope, the whole thing slopes toward it, right?”

  He blinked, startled. “You’re right! But it didn’t! So there must be something equally heavy in the wagon that kept it level despite Hautos’s weight—like a big, solid rock.”

  They crept up on the wagon, slipping closer as Hautos slammed the heavy door. “Look!” Jace whispered.

  Ropes slid up from the ground, weaving tightly against the door. A small series of stones rolled forward too, piling themselves against the steps hanging from the back of the wagon. If they stepped on the stair, a stone would fall with a tinkling sound and warn Hautos. “What’s happening?” Jace asked.

  “It’s the circus helpers, the ones who fill the chalk bins and tidy up the ropes. They’re helping him!”

  “Circus helpers? I thought that was just some sort of magic.”

  “Did you ever notice how the circus doesn’t pay anyone to help out, but all the grunt work gets done anyway? Most people just ignore it or assume it’s some minor prestidigitation by one of the workers, but I never did. I call them the ‘circus helpers.’ I saw one once, and it looked like a little white sparrow. Sort of small, winged. When it saw me looking, it vanished.”

  “You know, you’re right. I didn’t really think about it at the time. I just assumed they’d always been here.” Jace froze, grabbing her hand. “How many years ago did you start noticing them, Cerisse?”

  “Oh, about five.” She rolled her eyes, making the connection. “You’re right. It was just about the time Belen came. Right after Angvale was attacked.”

  “He’s the one who lied to Belen and stole the village stone.” It all made sense. Jace ground his teeth in anger. First the werewolves, now Belen, and now the stone. Worver was far more evil than Jace had given him credit for being. “I think we can get close enough to the side of this wagon to peek inside. Maybe we can see what Hautos is doing in there.”

  Jace moved quietly, slipping across the dusty clearing between wagons until he reached the heavy one with the minotaur inside. Cerisse followed him, keeping an eye out for anyone else who might catch them in the act. They crept to the side of the wagon and pulled themselves up to the windowsill to catch a glimpse inside through the open shutters.

  There was Hautos, kneeling over Ebano, whom he had placed on a blanket on the floor. The minotaur was removing a corner of a thick gray blanket from a tall lump wrapped in protective ropes. The blanket fell away slowly, revealing white stone beneath. Jace could see that the surface was covered in delicate tracery carved into the stone by a master hand. There were etchings of vines, flowers, and birds on the stone that looked so real Jace thought they might flap their wings and fly away when the minotaur got too close. A soft, faint glow emanated from the rock, luminous like night blossoms in the moonlight. The minotaur snorted and lifted Ebano’s arm to check his pulse. Dropping the limp arm, the minotaur started digging through Ebano’s pockets and found a small amount of money in a leather bag.

  “I thought minotaurs were supposed to be honorable,” Cerisse snarked.

  “Sssh,” Jace hissed. If Hautos heard them … but no, the minotaur was far too interested in the bag of money he’d taken from the hypnotist’s sleeve. Apparently satisfied, the minotaur grabbed Ebano’s hand again and pressed it to the stone. A soft brightness washed out from the stone, covering Ebano like a blanket. Hautos stepped away quickly and watched, his big dark eyes absorbing the radiance.

  “What’s happening?”

  “Look at his back!” Jace shushed her. “His wounds are healing
!”

  Indeed, the scorched and blackened flesh along Ebano’s back was turning pink again, the charred velvet of his robes fluttering away from lacerations caused by acid all along his spine. Where the sickening ivory of bone had shown through, muscle and sinew were knitting together again. And his breathing, once labored and faint, deepened with a shuddering rush. Although his clothes were still ragged and ruined, the hypnotist’s body was recovering at an astounding rate. The stone was healing him, feeding the flame of his life and slowly encouraging it to flare up again.

  In the phosphorescent light of the stone’s radiance, Jace began to make out other figures, small and delicate, clustered around Ebano. Barely taller than Jace’s forearm, they were tugging at Ebano’s robes, pulling the edges away from the wounds. One carried silken thread and lanced the lacerations, stitching the skin together as one might sew up a blanket. Where the thread settled against the mesmerist’s skin, it sank in and vanished, leaving perfect, unmarred flesh in its wake.

  “What are those?” This time, it was Jace’s turn to risk the whisper. Cerisse gave a mystified shrug, staring in awe. There were several of the little creatures fluttering about the stone now, one carrying a thimbleful of water to the fallen man’s lips, another delicately scraping away dead flesh on the worst of the burns to reveal fresh, newly grown skin beneath. Jace and Cerisse gaped.

  “Those are the circus helpers! Spirits of the stone! The fairies are doing all the work around here. Ooh, that steams me!” Cerisse lowered herself, unable to watch any more. “My mother told me stories of the fairies that lived in the woods when she was a child. Worver, you filthy, stinking, horrible man! You’ve enslaved them the same way you’re going to enslave Belen!”

  Jace dropped down beside her, crouching behind the wagon’s wheel. “Poor things. They probably serve whoever has control of the stone. They don’t have a choice,” Jace guessed. He rubbed his chin. “That’s why the circus makes so much money. He doesn’t pay laborers, and nobody can see the fairies unless they’re near the stone, so nobody complains. I bet that’s why he stole Chislev’s stone in the first place.”

  There was a soft moan from within the wagon. Jace snuck back up, peering over the windowsill again to see the mesmerist lifting his head from the floor with a bemused expression. Grunting, Hautos reached for a rope coiled nearby and drew it out, wrapping it around Ebano’s body with ruthless efficiency. Too weak and confused to do more than protest in his odd foreign language, Ebano was quickly tied down. Hautos pulled a long knife from his belt and held it near the mesmerist’s eye. “You healed so we can show dragon lady. You try to get away, I kill you. You make too much noise, I kill you. Pretty much, you do anything at all, I kill you. You do nothing. Soon Worver will tell me, and I kill you anyway. Just a matter of time, you stupid no-language finger waggler. Understand?” Whether Ebano understood or not, the threat of the knife passing back and forth a few inches from his nose seemed to have gotten the minotaur’s point across.

  “Why, that rotten minotaur! Do you think he’ll really hurt Ebano?” Cerisse reached for one of the three darts she had salvaged from the fight with the arcox and started to head for the door of the wagon. Jace grabbed her shoulder, shoving her back against the wagon.

  “Stop! We can’t beat Hautos. He can lift an elephant over his head!”

  “Yeah, but he’s about as smart as a board.” Cerisse pushed back, making Jace step away. “They’re going to kill Ebano anyway, and if we can help him get free, he can use magic on the minotaur. We just have to distract Hautos long enough to untie Ebano and make sure he’s all right.”

  Fair point. As annoying as Cerisse was sometimes, she could always be counted on to find a way out of a bad situation. “All right. I’ll get Hautos’s attention and make him chase me. You slip into the wagon and untie Ebano. Ready?”

  Cerisse had no time to argue because the wagon door was opening. Jace winked at her and lunged out into the clearing to face the minotaur as the heavy strongman was stepping outside. “You know, Hautos, I always knew you were stupid. I just didn’t know how stupid. Do you really do everything Worver tells you? I swear, if I didn’t know better, I’d think you really were one of the circus oxen. Do you pull wagons too?”

  The minotaur’s nostrils flared, his head surging up to stare Jace in the eye. Jace doubted anyone had ever spoken to the hugely muscular, tremendously strong Hautos this way before. Hautos charged down the stairs toward him with an ear-splitting bellow.

  Jace fled, feet pounding the earth with all of his might. His advantage was his speed—the minotaur was notoriously slow, and his hooves didn’t have the traction of Jace’s boots. The boy put on a burst of speed, hoping to get a wide berth between himself and Hautos’s fists. The minotaur was in full chase, barely able to make words as he raged behind Jace. Jace ducked around wagons, dived over booths, and dodged behind the guess-your-weight machine, Hautos only steps behind. He heard shrieks from performers jumping out of the way and nearly ran over some of the halfling cannoneers. “Move! Move! Move!” he shouted at them as he leaped over their heads. They shouted angrily after him, but their cries were cut short from being bowled over and nearly skewered on Hautos’s horns.

  Jace’s breath was coming in short, gasping puffs. His thighs hurt from trying to stay ahead of the minotaur, and he had already circled the lion cages twice in the hopes of losing him, but Hautos wasn’t about to be shaken from his prey. Jace tried to lose him among the flapping laundry of the horseback riders, but Hautos tore down the fluttering cloaks and left them in piles on the ground. Gathering his strength, Jace dodged in and out among the firebreathers, yelping as he moved too close to their practice and singed off the top of his hair. Again, Hautos wasn’t deterred, charging through the braziers of hot coals with no thought at all to his own well-being.

  Hautos might be stupid, Jace thought, but he sure was stubborn.

  There! Up ahead! I might be able to lose him behind that red wagon.

  Then Jace realized that red wagon was the red wagon—the one he’d run from in the first place. Ebano and Cerisse were climbing down the stairs, completely unaware that Jace was running toward them, trailing a horned sledgehammer of wrath. Jace had only enough breath to shout their names, hoping they could duck aside before Hautos saw them.

  Too late.

  If Jace thought the minotaur was angered at being called stupid, it was nothing to how he reacted when he saw Ebano escaping. Hautos’s eyes reddened, his jaw clenched, and Jace thought he actually saw steam coming out of the strongman’s nostrils.

  “Ebano says he has no spells!” Cerisse shouted in terror. “We’ve got nothing!”

  Well, it was a good try. Jace threw himself past the wagon opening, desperate to find anything that would pull the minotaur’s attention from the others. Hautos had changed directions, piling on speed as he charged the wagon door. “Cerisse! Get out of his way!”

  She clambered up the stairs, scrabbling out of the minotaur’s path. Ebano moved with her, but never took his eyes off the charging minotaur.

  Cerisse started throwing things—laundry, juggling pins, wagon equipment—anything she could reach inside the wagon. Hautos ignored her and kept after Jace, bawling from the depths of his belly. Fingers brushing Jace’s tunic, the minotaur hurled himself full speed up the steps of the red wagon. Jace spun and drew his sword from his belt, ready to let the minotaur pound him to a pulp in order to save his friends.

  Hautos practically flew up the three steps to the wagon’s door, stepped through the doorway, and ran face first into a thick iron skillet. The minotaur staggered, knees quaking. He took a half step backward, missed the stair, and fell. He landed flat on his back, a little poof of dust swirling around him. His eyes crossed and his tongue lolled from his mouth.

  The velvet-robed mesmerist stepped out onto the stair, crossing the frying pan over his chest as if it were a sacred weapon. He gave Jace a very stern stare. “Surprise,” he intoned somberly, “is best magic.”
r />   CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  an you hear me?” Jace whispered into the wagon’s darkness. Cerisse had pulled the window nearly shut so that none of the passing circus performers would overhear them. Hautos was tied up and left on a cot they’d uncovered amid the random storage items that took up most of the wagon.

  While she and Ebano had been triple and quadruple knotting those ropes, Jace had taken the time to untie the stone, removing all of the covers that had hidden it and revealing the glistening white surface. It was covered with small carvings, so lifelike that Jace thought the wings on one of the birds might beat at any moment. The craftsmanship was beautiful, beyond anything he’d ever seen. “Can you hear me?” he asked again.

  There was a soft stirring in the air, and the stone began to softly glow. It was faint, like the twinkling of a single candle spread out along the length of the marble. The stone itself was large, almost as tall as Jace, and as thick as the length from Jace’s wrist to his elbow. Jace’s hand lingered over a carving of a small fox inquisitively slinking through twined underbrush. The fur was detailed, each tuft painstakingly worked into the stone. The fox crept down a forest road near a village symbolized by thatched roofs peeking through the trees. “Angvale,” Jace said, remembering the ruined town.

  A weight landed on his shoulder, something light and gentle.

  “Home.” The voice was thready and soft. A sigh tinkled like tiny silvery bells.

  Jace tried not to jump at the sound of it. He turned his head slowly to look at the little being crouching on his shoulder. It was small, hardly as long as his forearm if it stood up straight. Gossamer wings flickered and trailed behind it like silk in the wind, and its face was beautiful, if filled with a keen sadness.

  “Jace,” Cerisse muttered, “stand very still. You have a fairy on you.”

  “I know.” He smiled. “What do I do?”

  Cerisse rubbed her temples, squeezing her eyes shut. “Mom told me that you should feed fairies to show them you’re friendly. So … give it something to eat?”