A Handful of Men: The Complete Series

by Dave Duncan

  Stroke.

  Gath had no pore that was not streaming sweat. He was certain he had no skin left on his hands. Every muscle in his body burned.

  Stroke.

  He wanted to ask Vork how he felt now about being a raider, but he had no breath for speaking. His lungs and throat were raw and there was a sour taste of metal in his mouth. He was starting to feel a stitch in his side.

  Stroke.

  Oars swung. Thole pins creaked. The coxswain’s pipe called the stroke. Water hissed past the thin planks of the narrow hull. Salt-scented sea wind blew blessedly cool on fevered skin.

  Stroke.

  This was a test, of course. Smart-aleck kids had to learn the rough side of the legend. Two uppity sons of thanes were being shown that they weren’t men yet. Even pulling together, they could not keep up with the real sailors, not for long, not for much longer. This was the price of hitching a ride on a thane’s longship.

  Stroke.

  The crew was watching, waiting for the mistake. Gath could feel the grins all around. The stroke was faster than usual. Trouble was, he knew what was going to happen even more surely than the crew did.

  Stroke.

  Prescience was a blessing and also a terrible curse. It produced invaluable warnings of trouble ahead and wonderful anticipation of pleasures in store. When it showed bad futures and especially inevitable bad futures, then it could drive a man insane.

  Stroke.

  A trickle of sweat ran down the bare back in front of his eyes. So the others were feeling the pace, too. They could keep it up for hours, though. High behind Blood Wave the seabirds floated in the salt air, cool and serene. Lucky birds!

  Stroke.

  Gath’s fingers were knotting, losing their grip on the oar. The blood was making it slippery anyway. Not long now. He and Vork were going to catch a crab. Soon!

  Stroke.

  Then they were going to be given a taste of the rope’s end, sailor talk for flogging. Toughen up the gazoonies a bit — evilishly painful. Only consolation was he knew he was going to keep quiet under it. Vork wasn’t, not quite.

  Stroke.

  This is what Vork had thought he wanted, to be a raider like his father before him, and his father, and all their forefathers since the coming of the Gods. Gath didn’t want that.

  Stroke.

  He just wanted to get to Nordland and tell the thanes about the usurper and the overthrow of the wardens and the new protocol Dad had invented before he died. Doing it for Dad’s memory — duty.

  Stroke.

  Doing it for Dad. Here it came now —

  Crab!

  The oar slammed into the two boys’ chests, hurling them backward. Angry yells…

  4

  A one-horse chaise, a stagecoach, a longship, and a leaky old coaster…

  Still very much alive, Gath’s father sailed a distant, warmer ocean. At the far side of the world. Dreadnought wallowed over a mirrored sea under a sun of molten brass. The breathless wind was barely able to keep her sails full; gulls preened on the yards rather than bother flying on such a day. A hazy smudge to northward marked the island of Kith.

  King Rap of Krasnegar leaned on the rail and thought dark thoughts of failure and defeat. The morning was barely half gone at that longitude, but it had already left a bloody stain on the pages of history: five legions dead, untold thousands of goblins dead.

  All of this callous slaughter had apparently been committed just to demonstrate the power of the usurper. Doubtless Zinixo was even now gloating in Hub, master of the world, the self-styled Almighty. Perhaps at that very moment hundreds of free sorcerers were responding to his threats, flocking into the capital to be imprinted with unbreakable loyalty and enrolled in the Covin.

  True, Warlock Olybino had proclaimed the new protocol, which was a giant step forward, but he had died doing so. Why should the frees choose to join Rap’s mythical resistance when it had failed to save its spokesman? Olybino’s sacrifice had revealed the opposition’s weakness and lack of organization.

  The occult scent of dragon still tainted the ambience. The Covin seemed to be herding the worms home to Dragon Reach from their feast at Bandor. That was a relief, but Rap would not breathe easy until all those monsters were safely penned, back in their nests. Meanwhile he had not a clue as to what he should do next.

  His brooding was interrupted by a jingle of human finger bones. Lithe and menacing, Tik Tok stalked across the deck to his side, grinning under the multicolored tattoos that covered his face and most of the rest of him, also. Apparently grinning did not hurt when one wore a bone through the nose, although it seemed as if it should. His teeth had been filed to sharp points. The seashells decorating the thick black bush of his hair were new; apart from them he wore only his customary apron of clattering bones.

  “You grieve, my friend? You language unconsolidated?”

  “I have a lot to languish about.”

  Eyes twinkling, the cannibal took hold of Rap’s shoulder in an astonishingly powerful grip. He kneaded it appraisingly. “You must not pine! You will shriven up, weather away to skin and bones. We cannot permeate such a waste.” His manner implied that he had the perfect recipe in mind already.

  “Cheer me up, then.”

  Tik Tok waved a hand to indicate the shabby old ship. “Twenty-nine sorcerers, eight mages? If we want we can move this old tub to Hub itself in a twiddling.”

  “Not without giving ourselves away to the Covin, we can’t.”

  The cannibal removed his hand so he could lean back with his elbows on the rail. “But you have other plans ready?”

  “Er, not finalized.”

  Tik Tok pouted dangerously. “Well, we cannot wait around forever! Prognostication is the thief of time.”

  He was mad because Rap had pulled him away from a fight. Despite his invariant flippancy, he was probably almost as murderous as he looked. Many of the other twenty-four anthropophagi aboard appeared even more bloodcurdling, yet they all accepted Tik Tok as leader. Just because he was a potent sorcerer did not mean he did not want to eat someone.

  At that moment another hand descended on Rap’s shoulder. In this case the hand was the size of a small pillow. Staggering slightly under the load, he glanced around, annoyed that anyone as enormous as Thrugg should have approached without his noticing.

  The troll opened his beard in a friendly smile, revealing enough ivory to furnish a spinet keyboard. Even more than Tik Tok, he could have moonlighted as a nightmare, although his bestial appearance hid a heart as gentle as a daisy. He was without question the most powerful sorcerer aboard, even stronger than his mother the warden. The back of his hand and the visible parts of his face were burned, but most of his great bulk was hidden in loose clothing to keep the sun off. He was still a monster, though.

  “He’s right. Rap,” Thrugg mumbled. “The past is over. What matters is to win the future.”

  Obviously the whole improbable army was on the verge of mutiny. No one would openly accuse Rap of causing Olybino’s death, but his refusal to let the group become involved had been an admission of weakness, and it rankled. He had best rally his troops quickly now, before half of them began eating the other half out of sheer frustration. The entire ill-assorted crew was watching. Near-naked anthropophagi lay sprawled around the deck in twos and threes. Most of the trolls were down in the cabins or the hold, by themselves, staying out of the sun, but they were watching nonetheless. Witch Grunth had appropriated the best hideaway, the chain locker. There she had removed all her clothing for comfort and was combing her shaggy gray hair. Nudity emphasized her grotesque animal bulk, wrinkled and flabby and hideous. She, too, was waiting for Rap’s reaction.

  Old Doctor Sagorn, the only mundane aboard, held the wheel, playing at being sailor to show how childishly easy that was to one of his intellectual superiority. The effect was rather spoiled by his badly shredded clothing, but he sneered his customary arrogant smile.

  “What the gentlemen are implying
, your Majesty,” he said, “is that the late Warlock Olybino has done your work for you. You no longer need travel the world, whispering news of your counterrevolution. All the free sorcerers are now aware of it. You are the leader? Lead us somewhere.”

  Leader! What mad whirl of the Gods’ dice had ever thrust that honor on Rap? He was about the least powerful sorcerer in Pandemia, so why him? Just because he had invented the new protocol did not mean he was the man to bring it to pass, if anyone ever could. He sensed the dragons again and shivered. He could do nothing until they were safely home in their nests. Nothing violent, that was, nothing to provoke the Covin openly and distract it from worm herding. But yes, there must be other, lesser things to be done, as Tik Tok had suggested.

  “I’m greatly relieved that I don’t need to visit Sysanasso, anyway,” Rap said. “If there are any free faun sorcerers they must have heard Olybino’s message as clearly as we did. Does anyone disagree with that?”

  Thrugg shook his great head. Tik Tok just wiggled the bone in his nose expectantly. Everyone in the ship was listening — except for a pair of trolls down in the hold who had found more exciting things to do.

  “And we continue our journey to Thume?”

  Trolls and cannibals all scowled. Witch Grunth snorted disbelievingly in the chain locker. It was one thing to accept in an intellectual way that there must be some vast unknown power at work in Thume. To accept it emotionally was barely possible even inside any occult shielding; out in the open where its aversion spell was effective, Thume seemed like the wildest sort of mirage, irrelevant nonsense.

  Perhaps because he was a mundane, Sagorn believed in Thume. He was nodding sardonically. “But it will take us weeks to get there,” he said. “Years at this pace. I don’t suppose you ladies and gentlemen could magic up a cooling breeze?”

  All heads shook. Meddling with the weather would be a recklessly conspicuous use of sorcery, as he well knew. He was just being tiresome.

  “Big storm coming,” Thrugg mumbled, sniffing the air.

  Rap abandoned the idea of Thume. His army would not follow him there. He had better find a better plan, and soon. An idea began to glimmer at the back of his mind. It needed time to germinate, though. Distraction…

  “Sagorn, you’re a historian. In any of the dragon wars, did anyone ever raise all the dragons?”

  For a moment the old scholar’s pale blue eyes went as blank as the sky. Then their usual penetrating gleam returned. “Not that I can recall. But in ancient times there were many more of the worms. What you want me to tell you is whether anyone ever flew as many as Zinixo did today?”

  “Er, yes.”

  “Well? How many was that?” Sagorn demanded triumphantly.

  Rap just knew that it had been a lot. He referred the question to the others, whose greater power would have granted them better vision in the ambience.

  Tik Tok said three hundred and the anthropophagi backed their chief. Thrugg estimated two hundred and the trolls backed him, although with less fervor. The split was becoming worrisomely obvious. Sagorn had noticed it, and his haggard old face bore a sardonic sneer as he answered Rap’s question.

  “No. The highest count I can ever recall reading of was fifteen. Of course record keeping, like many other things, tends to become spotty in the aftermath of a dragon wasting. Most areas do not recover for several centuries. But one dragon per legion was regarded as a pushover for the dragon. They’re just about indestructible.” The gangly old man smirked to himself, admiring his own universal expertise.

  “So why did Zinixo raise so many?” Rap demanded.

  “Terror?” That thought came from Grunth belowdecks.

  “To see if he could control so many?” suggested one of the trolls.

  “A little boy playing with Daddy’s spear?” said a cannibal.

  “Because he is insane,” Sagorn snapped. “He is trying to convince himself that he is invincible, and the harder he tries the less he believes himself.”

  “Don’t suppose it matters much.” Rap was surprised that no one else had caught up with his idea yet, but he was sure of it now. “What does matter is that here on this ship we have the second-greatest concentration of sorcery in the world, and Dragon Reach is just over there. Thataway. I say that that’s our part in the war! We go to Dragon Reach and make certain Zinixo never uses the worms again!”

  A flash of satisfaction brightened the ambience and was hastily suppressed.

  Tik Tok beamed. “A brilliant perspiration!”

  “Clever!” Sagorn murmured. “How do you feel about destroying dragons. Master Thrugg?”

  Thrugg was already nodding. “Monsters!” he growled. He would not willingly hurt any person and perhaps no animal, either, but a dragon would be fair game even for him. That was a war that trolls could fight.

  “Of course,” the old jotunn added, with an admiring glance at Rap, “such an act is a flagrant breach of the Protocol, but the usurper has already nullified the Protocol. Today Zinixo set the precedent, so the warlock of the south can no longer claim the dragons as his prerogative! Oh, very appropriate! You can rid the world of the worms at last!”

  Rap had not thought of going that far. He often recalled the breathtaking beauty of the dawn rising he had once witnessed at Wurth Redoubt. That had been one of the most moving experiences of his life, but no beauty could justify the evil those monsters had wrought throughout history. The world would be a better place without the dragons. He nodded sadly.

  Lith’rian would be incensed beyond imagining.

  “You had better warn him what you plan,” Grunth sent. “He has a soft spot for his dragons.”

  She was right, of course. The warlock of the south was the one essential character still missing from the stage. He had not yet been heard from, although he was almost certainly skulking somewhere in Ilrane. Somewhere? — Ilrane was only a subcontinent! He must still control a powerful band of votaries. As an elf he could never support Zinixo, a dwarf. They had been virulent opponents in the past and would always remain so, but elvish thinking was never predictable and Rap could not automatically count on Lith’rian’s assistance.

  He groaned. “Someone will have to go and explain to him.”

  Everyone smiled encouragingly in his direction.

  “I think Witch Grunth is the logical ambassador,” he protested. “Wardens should speak to wardens.” Lith’rian was fascinating, charming, and infinitely ruthless. Merely thinking about him gave Rap cold shivers.

  Sagorn snorted. “I can just see her Omnipotence going ashore in Ilrane unnoticed.”

  “She would be rather contiguous,” Tik Tok agreed thoughtfully. “Unless she was heavily despised.”

  Now Rap was seriously alarmed. “You’re suggesting I go and tell the warlock of the south that we’re going to kill off all his rootin’ dragons?” he squealed. He glanced around and saw that was exactly what they were suggesting — the ship was full of smiles.

  “We’ll deal with the dragons,” Thrugg rumbled in his cheerful-earthquake register, thumping Rap on the shoulder so enthusiastically that he almost crumpled to the deck. “You deal with the warlock.”

  “Carried anonymously!” Tik Tok proclaimed.

  Rap consoled himself with the thought that nothing was likely to happen for a few days yet. Perhaps he would think up a better idea before then. Meanwhile, he had proposed a definite course of action and won back his army’s loyalty, at least for the moment.

  “I see I have just been volunteered to be ambassador to Ilrane. Meanwhile, how about lunch?”

  “Make up your mind,” Tik Tok said. “Which do you want to be?”

  5

  A phaeton, a stagecoach, a longship, a leaky old coaster — and a rock.

  Princess Kadolan, Rap’s elder daughter, sat on a boulder on a hilltop. The scenery was heart-achingly familiar, niggling at her homesickness — the slopes all carpeted with low herbs, some bearing tiny flowers as if a shower of many-colored stars had just passed
over. Scraggy grass between the rocks fluttered in the cool breeze blowing from the washed-out blue sky, but there were no trees at all here in the tundra. Down in the hollows the ground was bright green with bog moss and sedge.

  Just over the northern horizon lay the Winter Ocean, and Krasnegar, the home she had not seen in months and had not truly expected to see again. She shivered with eagerness to get there. Then all those terrible months she had spent with the goblins would fade like a nightmare, wouldn’t they? Perhaps her parents would be home before her, and oh, what a welcome they would give her! Even if they weren’t there yet, there would be Eva and little Holi, who must have grown a lot and would be talking more now. There would be hundreds of old friends and they would all be eager to hear Kadie’s news. She would introduce them all to her new friend and rescuer, Thaïle.

  The pixie also sat on the boulder, staring intently at nothing. She had chosen her seat and it was not really large enough for two. There were many other boulders nearby, but Kadie wanted to stay as close to her new protector as possible.

  Thaïle was little older than Kadie herself and looked a lot like the pictures of elves Kadie had seen in books. Her ears were pointed, her eyes large and gold, oddly slanted, and she had a wide nose, a little like Dad’s. She was very pretty, though, and to be rescued by a pixie sorceress was an extremely romantic adventure. No one had seen a pixie in a thousand years.

  Kadie was bursting with questions, but she thought it would be unwise to interrupt a sorceress when she was thinking, or whatever Thaïle was doing. Traveling by magic was a very odd business, not at all what the books had led her to expect. There had been a sort of whoosh! and a flying blackness. Then she had expected to be in Krasnegar, but instead the two of them had been here in the tundra, as if they’d fallen a little short, like Gath’s arrows when he tried archery. But it wasn’t that the magic had run out, or anything. Thaïle had said something about watchers, and needing to plan the last bit.