Master of Dragons

by Margaret Weis

  “Human!” called Lysira. “Marcus! You can’t fight Grald. Go back inside your room! Lock yourself up safe!”

  Now it was Marcus who hesitated. He didn’t want to be trapped in another horrible dream. One from which he might never escape.

  “Melisande’s sons—both her sons—will avenge her,” said Marcus.

  Gripping his courage in his empty sword hand, Marcus left Ven’s mind and flung himself headlong into Grald’s.

  The dragon had hold of Ven’s ankle, the same place where, when Ven was a child, a bulldog had bitten into the scaled flesh. Draconas had saved Ven, then, but Draconas wasn’t here to save him now. Ven had to save himself. He stared at the scaled leg, the leg he had stared at with loathing every day of his life since the day he’d first realized that he was different.

  He had a choice. He could die—worse than die—writhing helpless in the grip of the father who had made him what he was.

  Or he could fight. And make him pay.

  Ven looked up at Grald, at the leering face bending over him, at the wings starting to spread wide, filling the darkness. The old catechism that Bellona had made him recite on his birthday came back to him.

  “What is your name?”

  “Ven.”

  “Your true name.”

  “Vengeance.”

  The magic roiled and bubbled and surged up from some pit deep inside him. The magic seethed and burned and twisted. Raw and unformed, mingled with pent-up rage, the magic spewed from Ven’s mouth. He vomited fire and spit acid. The fire seared Grald’s eyes, and the acid sprayed over the claws that held Ven’s leg. The dragon roared and reared back his head. Scales bubbled in the acid, his eyes burned. Grald snatched his claw away.

  Ven rose to his feet. He reached out to the past and seized hold of the power. He took hold of every sneer, every averted glance, every pitying gaze. He seized his mother’s pain, Bellona’s twisted love, Evelina’s mockery. He grabbed his own fury and his siblings’ pride, and he bundled all of it into a crackling, blazing ball. He hurled that ball with all his strength at his father.

  The magic struck the dragon full in the chest and sent him crashing back against a solid stone wall. The building shook, the ground trembled. Ven collapsed.

  His strength flowed from him like blood from a pierced heart. He’d given it all, everything, nothing was left. He was weak and helpless as the squalling babe lying alongside his twin, lying in his mother’s blood, except that now he lay in the blood of his father.

  It seemed to Grald that he’d been struck by the sun.

  The molten fire that had been conjured of Ven’s very soul smote the dragon full in the chest. The magic melted the armorlike scales, seared through to the flesh, burned away the flesh to attack the bone and pulsing organs beneath. The magic splashed onto Grald’s eyes and head, blinding him, and sprayed over his wings, which were yet emerging, causing holes to open where the fiery blobs hit the fragile membrane. What human flesh still remained on the dragon dissolved, bubbling horribly, like fat on a hot skillet.

  The full impact of the blow fell on the dragon’s breastbone, right over the heart, jolting it out of its centuries-old rhythm. The dragon’s heart lurched and thumped wildly, erratically. Grald could not catch his breath. Air rattled and whistled in his chest. Looking down with his half-blind eyes, he saw shattered bone and a mass of charred and bleeding flesh.

  Grald was in unbearable pain. He was dying. Slain by the son. Slain by the mother.

  Vengeance. Grald has always known Ven’s name and been mightily amused by it.

  “Not now!” the dragon raged, staggering. “Not yet!”

  His son’s living heart. It would keep him alive.

  Grald lurched toward Ven, who lay unconscious on the floor. Grald’s own heart hammered and shook. He was finding it increasingly difficult to draw a breath. He fixed all his concentration on his son. Lunging forward with a claw that yet had the strength to rip open Ven’s human chest, he bent to pluck out his heart.

  A human blocked his way. Grald struggled to see through the smoke that was drifting from the fire of the magic into his mind.

  The prince. The brother. He stood over Ven’s body, blocking the way.

  The sons of Melisande.

  Human flesh and bone. Fragile and soft.

  Grald swiped his claw at the prince, intending to smash the puny frame to bloody pulp, cleave him open, cast him to one side, then get at his prey.

  The dragon’s claw passed through air, whistled through darkness, touched nothing.

  The dragon’s heart thudded and began to slow. Grald toppled to the floor, landing with a thud that cracked stone walls and sent tremors through the ground. The dragon never knew he had fallen over. He stared at the human, who wavered in his sight, and he kept staring into death and beyond.

  25

  THE DRAGON’S AGONIZED RAGE BURST AGAINST MARCUS, SEEMING to boil his blood. And then the darkness of death began to rush in like a rolling tide, swallowing up the rage, thundering down on Marcus, crashing, churning, and crushing.

  “Run!” Lysira warned him. “Don’t get caught inside Grald’s mind!”

  Marcus fled the dragon’s mind. He stood, shivering, in his little room, and watched Grald die.

  “Ven?” Marcus called.

  There was no answer. His brother’s mind was empty, the colors drained. He too was dying.

  If Marcus had been there, physically present, he could have saved his brother. But Marcus was far away, with a river between them. And he was running out of time.

  “Lysira!” he cried.

  “Let him go,” the young female dragon said to him, and she sounded shaken. “He should never have been born. Neither he nor the others.”

  “Others?” Marcus cried, grasping hold of that word. “What others?”

  The dragon shut her mind and he could not find a way back in.

  Desperate, searching for help, Marcus ran about the streets of dragonkind, racing from one mind to another, battering on doors, hammering on windows, pleading for someone—anyone—to open up to him.

  He carried the image of Grald holding Ven’s bleeding, beating heart in his blood-stained claw and thrust that image into every mind he could find. Colors swirled around him, colors that had no name in the human vocabulary. If they existed at all in human vision, they were fleeting, transitory. Colors so beautiful his heart ached to bursting at the sight. Colors so hideous and horrifying that his soul shrank away from them.

  “You can’t let him die!” Marcus cried. “He is your child!”

  But the dragons saw it differently. They wanted Ven to die. If he died, so did their guilt.

  Raging, Marcus kicked at the doors and bashed his fist into the windows and, suddenly, one door opened so fast that he was caught by surprise and nearly tumbled over the threshold.

  “Who are you?”

  A voice. Words. Spoken words. A voice like his voice speaking words like his words. A human voice, yet with something of the dragon in it, for he saw it spangled with silver and radiating shining light.

  “Who are you?” Marcus countered, dazzled by the brilliance.

  “I am Sorrow, Ven’s sister—part human, part dragon.”

  Marcus could see her now. The light reflected off scales and shone on her long hair.

  “I am Ven’s brother,” Marcus replied, awed.

  “Impossible. You are human,” said the sister scornfully.

  “I don’t have time to explain. Ven is in dire peril. Are you in Dragonkeep? Can you go to him?”

  “That picture you showed me, of the dragon trying to kill him—”

  “That image is from the dragon’s own mind. Ven fought for his life and now the dragon is dead and Ven is dying ...”

  “Dead? The dragon is dead? My father is dead?” Sorrow was appalled.

  “He tried to kill Ven,” Marcus returned. “Ven had no choice—”

  “I don’t believe you!” the sister cried in rage. “Why? Why would our father
kill his own son? Ven is to be our leader.”

  “The dragon meant to take Ven’s body. As I showed you. We don’t have time for this!”

  “You care about Ven, don’t you?” Sorrow sounded puzzled.

  “He’s my brother,” Marcus said. “And he’s your brother, too. You have to help him.”

  “He killed our father . . .” said the sister slowly.

  Marcus would have liked to have grabbed her and shaken her. “Look!” he said angrily and he held up the image to her mind.

  The sister looked. She saw the human she had known as Grald in the tomb, the gaping hole where the heart had been torn from the chest, the man’s eyes wide in death. She saw the dragon, half in, half out of human flesh. Still, she wasn’t convinced.

  “I don’t believe that our father would take a human body. That he would become one of you. Why would he?”

  “To enslave us, rule us, conquer us—” Marcus paused.

  He heard the sounds of wings beating and the hissing intake of breath. A shadow passed over him, chilling him. The shadow glided over him again, larger, darker.

  Lysira’s colors flooded Marcus’s brain.

  “Human! Maristara is coming. The dragon ruler of Seth. She knows something has happened to Grald, and she is on her way to investigate. You have to leave. Now! Go back to your little room and shut and bolt the door. No more drunken reveling.”

  “If the dragon finds Ven, she’ll kill him,” Marcus argued. “She will finish what Grald started!”

  “There will be no need for her to kill the dragon’s son. He will be dead by the time she arrives.” Lysira returned. “Now, go! Quickly! Before she catches you!”

  Marcus stepped into his little room, but he did not close the door.

  “The next time you see Ven,” he said to Sorrow. “He won’t be Ven. He’ll be the dragon. Ven will by lying in that tomb—”

  The shadow of the wings covered him. He cast one last, pleading look at Sorrow and then slammed shut the door.

  Ven lay stretched out, his body relaxed, in his cave in the forest. A sliver of twilight, about to be extinguished by night, trickled into the cavern’s entrance through the heavy foliage of the trees that surrounded the cave. Ven heard Bellona’s voice calling him, but he didn’t move. She had no hold on him now. None of them did.

  He heard the flap of dragon wings outside the cave, but that didn’t matter. When the dragon arrived, he would be gone.

  The little girl walked into the cave. She squatted down on her haunches beside him, peered into his face.

  “Go away,” said Ven wearily. “I did what you wanted. I did what they all wanted.”

  “So now you’re going to give up and die, is that it?”

  “What do you care?”

  “And what about Marcus? You asked him for help and he gave it. He and his kingdom are in danger.”

  “That’s his problem,” Ven returned. “He has two human legs and a pretty human face. Someone will help him—”

  “You saw the army of dragon warriors. You know that your brother and his people cannot win against them.”

  “So will it make my brother feel better if I’m standing there by his side, ready to die with him?” Ven asked, annoyed.

  “I’m not asking you to die for him, Ven,” said Draconas, leaning close. “I’m asking you to live. In the kingdom of Seth, your mother’s kingdom, there are people who know how to fight this kind of war. People who have been fighting dragons for centuries. They’ve been fighting for all the wrong reasons, but that doesn’t matter. Go to them, Ven. Tell them the truth. You can enter safely now. Maristara is away.”

  Ven smiled. “Good plan, Draconas. But it’s wishful thinking. I’m dying and you know it. And you can’t save me. Not this time.”

  “Ven—” called Draconas.

  Ven closed his eyes and refused to open them, and eventually the little girl went away.

  “Ven ...” a voice spoke his name. Bellona was there. In all these years, she’d never found his cave. She was there now. Stern and unsmiling, she regarded him in silence. But he knew that he’d pleased her. For the first and probably only time in his life, he’d pleased her. Bellona gave him a brief nod and then she was gone, and Ven was alone.

  He wasn’t afraid.

  He wasn’t anything.

  Ven let himself sink into the darkness. He let the darkness carry him along, as the river had taken Bellona’s body to the sea.

  Sorrow stared into the afterimage left behind by the human, Marcus. She pondered his words, considered what to do. She rose from her bed and went to the chamber next to hers. She sneaked inside, moving softly, but her brother’s senses were acute. Lucien’s slit eyes were already open.

  “I heard you talking in your sleep,” he said.

  “I wasn’t asleep,” said Sorrow.

  “Then who was here? Who were you talking to?” He looked closely at her face, which glimmered white in the darkness, and he rose from his bed. “What is it, Sorrow? What’s wrong?”

  Lucien was the most dragon of all the siblings. He had dragon arms and claws, dragon legs and feet. His torso was human flesh and bone, with a smattering of scales across his shoulders that extended up the back of his neck and over his head. His face was human. The eyes were slit eyes, like those of a reptile. He was quick and he was strong. The nearest in age to Sorrow, he was her confidant, her companion.

  “Come with me,” she said. “Be quiet. I don’t want to wake the others.”

  Lucien did not ask questions. He knew her, trusted that she had a good reason for this midnight ramble.

  As they walked through the labyrinthine corridors of the dragon’s lair, Sorrow shared the image of Ven’s human brother with Lucien. She shared his words, the pictures. Lucien was so shocked at the vision flaring before his eyes that he almost walked into a wall.

  “I don’t believe what he says about our father, Sorrow. The human lies.”

  “I don’t believe it either. That’s why we’re going there.”

  “To the Abbey?”

  Sorrow nodded. The cave was dark, but not to her eyes or her brother’s. They moved swifdy through the winding corridors of stone. They did not speak except with their thoughts, which sometimes converged to form a river, then separated, forking off into individual streams. The dragon’s children were not like dragons, who rarely give voice to their thoughts. Nor were they like humans, who are forced to do so. They blended speech and thought so that many times they had no idea where one began and the other left off.

  The corridor they walked led from the Abbey to the palace beneath the mountain. The corridor was used by the dragon, to travel from one place to another. Few humans knew of the existence of this corridor. What went on beneath the mountain was secret and was meant to stay that way. The children knew it from the mind of the dragon.

  The walls of the corridor were rimed with scales, marks of the dragon’s passage. The sight of these led Lucien to exclaim suddenly and vehemently, “Our father would never take the body of a human. It’s all a lie.”

  “A lie,” Sorrow agreed.

  She walked swiftly, confidently, certain of the outcome. The children of the dragon entered the great hall to find it awash with blood.

  In the center lay their father, dead.

  Sharp nails pierced Ven’s human flesh, claws raked the skin of his forearm. The pain was acute and dragged him up, struggling and fighting, from the deep.

  His eyes flared open. Sorrow bent over him.

  “Why did you do this!” she demanded, hissing in anger. “Why did you kill our father?”

  She dug her nails deeper in his arm, until the blood ran. Her fury flared through the darkness, lighting her face, blazing in her eyes, and staving off death, just for a moment.

  “You wouldn’t understand,” Ven said weakly. He closed his eyes, tried to sink back down beneath the dark surface. “Just go away and leave me alone.”

  “I think he’s dying,” Lucien said in hushed tones.r />
  “Oh, no, he’s not,” said Sorrow. “Not until I know the truth.”

  The hand that had drawn his blood moved to his forehead. Another hand rested, palm down, on his breast. His sister’s touch was healing; warmth poured through his body, thick and viscous and sweet as honey. Ven’s heartbeat strengthened. His breathing came easier. The darkness began to recede, and he was floating rapidly to shore.

  Ven sat up and shoved her hands off him. His head ached and he felt sick to his stomach, but he was alive.

  “You will live,” said Sorrow coolly. “How long you live depends on your answers. Lucien is incredibly strong. He once tore a human apart limb by limb. He can do the same to you.”

  Ven didn’t look at them, either of them. He stared at the carcass of the dragon. Scaled flesh, clawed and mangled. Bones exposed. Blood running in rivulets into the chinks and cracks of the stone floor. Ven’s body was sticky with the blood. His sister’s hands had blood on them, from where she’d reverently touched the body.

  “Why did you kill our father?” she asked again, her voice breaking.

  Ven looked at her, really looked at her, for the first time. He saw that she was terrified.

  Grald had kept his children isolated, segregated. He kept them dependent on him. A good plan, for the dragon had never imagined leaving them. Dragons live for centuries. Grald would see his children age and die, see many generations of children die before he did. But he was dead. His children were alone and they couldn’t cope.

  Ven understood Sorrow’s fear. He recognized it as his own. In that moment Ven, who had always felt sorry only for himself, felt pity for another.

  “Why?” Sorrow shrieked, and she flung herself at him, striking him on the chest. “Why?”

  He said nothing, for there was nothing to say. She knew the reason; he’d seen the images in her mind. Her terrible “why” had nothing to do with Grald’s death. It had more to do with her own life, her own reason for being. She was asking herself for the first time the question Ven had been asking all these years.

  She wouldn’t like the answer, but he couldn’t help that.