A Bitter Brew

by Greg Curtis

  In fact from all accounts they were mostly busy helping with the clean-up. Callanar had been half destroyed and anyone who had any magic that could help was being used day and night. But when you were talking about a city of forty million people and up to one and a half million were dead and the city was in ruins, there was only so much that a few thousand people with a few spells could do.

  She also understood that the clean-up was further hampered by a lack of technology. They had no good steel tools and few horses and carts. Everything in the Empire had been run off magic, and without it they were almost helpless. Which made it seem odd to her that they hadn't asked for help. But it wasn't her place to ask and Darnial Marn who seemed to be in charge of the ceremonies for her people, was a remarkably taciturn woman. Maybe it was pride. Maybe they simply couldn't admit the fact that their first city – their capitol – had been ruined. Maybe they couldn't face that truth.

  “I see. Nevertheless I'll remain in town for a few days and see if I can speak with a few of them. I really do see the chance for a good business venture. Simone?” She turned to her companion.

  “But there's no one to congratulate! No medals to award. No celebration to arrange. Oster said there would at least be people to thank for their service. A proper ceremony in the Council Chambers.” She looked at Lady Peri with helplessness in her eyes. “What would we do?”

  “Whatever you want Simone. You know Oster just gave you this duty to get you out of the Royal Household. He has a world of problems to deal with and he finds the wives distract him. He doesn't want you back for at least a week. And he really doesn't want to see any more expenses listed on his accounts for clothes.”

  “But he likes my clothes!”

  “He's a man, dear. The only clothes he likes are the ones he can quickly remove from nubile young women! Besides, he's probably already searching for his next wife as we speak. And the way he's going the chances are that this one will be in swaddling cloth!”

  “He wouldn't! He promised! No more wives!” But then Lady Simone stopped and started thinking. And whatever she was thinking didn't seem to please her.

  Finally she turned to Marnie, a determined look growing in her eyes. “Do you have some good dressmakers in town? Cobblers? A proper inn?”

  Chapter Fifty Four

  “Hendrick!”

  Hendrick started as he heard Val called out his name suddenly and nearly put the hammer through his thumb instead of the cedar tile.

  But he didn't complain as he instantly realised why Val was calling to him. Looking up he saw the woman's legs slowly descending out of thin air, and realised that the bait had been taken. The Dragon Queen had arrived. Things were about to become interesting as the sage would say. Dangerous was how he would describe it. But it had to be done. No matter how dangerous she was, their enemy had to be met and named. And they had to find out what wrong had been done so they could attempt to put it right.

  Being stuck on a half-finished roof however, was not the way that Hendrick wanted to greet his visitor. Not this one. He felt vulnerable up high with nothing solid beneath him other than a few beams and batons. But he hadn't known exactly when she would come – only that she'd left the town some time before – and he had a lot of work to get through. The roof would not build itself after all. But then he wasn't the only one waiting for her. Val had been all but beside himself, as he waited to meet what he viewed as a living legend.

  Hendrick watched closely as the woman exited the portal and walked down the hill towards him, seeing her both as the woman in the windows to the past that he'd opened, and as the woman who had completely dominated the life of the part of him that was the memories of the ancient wizard. It was confusing seeing her in two such completely different ways. And yet it was her, exactly as she had been fifteen hundred years before. She was even wearing the same shimmering dress. A living scandal of the dressmaker's art, it was designed to tempt, and more importantly, to distract.

  “Erohilm.” Hendrick greeted his guest, “though I know that's not your name.”

  “Yes. You do seem to know a lot.” She smiled a little less warmly than he would have liked. “Too much really.”

  “Much too much in fact,” he agreed with her. “And can we dispense with the threats please. You'll want to know what I know, and what I've done. After all, I was expecting your visit. And threats won't help you.”

  “I didn't come to threaten you.”

  “Because in five hundred or a thousand years when you're ready to strike again, I'll be nothing more than a name in book?” It was the truth he supposed. She wasn't just vastly more powerful than him or any mage or wizard. She had the perspective of an immortal. Everyone died eventually.

  “There is that.” She looked at him, considering something. “Though I suspect you may be more than just a name. You have accumulated quite a reputation.”

  “Not compared to you.” He put down his hammer which he'd been using to nail in the cedar roof tiles and started down the ladder.

  “Would you care for some tea while we talk?” Then he thought about it for a moment. “Your visage is able to eat?”

  “Of course I can eat! This form is as real as yours.”

  “And yet not actually real.” He knew that. He didn't understand it, but against the list of all the things he didn't understand it was relatively unimportant.

  “Never mind,” he brushed the dust off his clothes and neatened himself a little bit with his hands. “We should probably speak about the more important things. Like what I know and how many others now know.”

  “Your mother is right about you.” She sighed. “You are a difficult child. I should have known that when you ruined my plans for Styrion Might.”

  “You mean saved thousands of lives!”

  “Hardly!” She fixed him with an annoyed stare. “Those in the inner city weren't going to die. It was a portal. A spell that took me years to prepare. They and the rest of the inner city would simply have found themselves on another world. Right next to an ancient temple. The Empire would have noticed them, and Styrion would have been returned to the fold.”

  “But you stopped that, and nearly ended everything right there. And then barely a month later you become a world walker and restarted everything by finding another temple. As I said, difficult! A living chaos!”

  “I live to please.” Hendrick answered her flippantly. He didn't quite know what to say to that. He didn't know if he believed her.

  “You tried to murder a million people in the Hold.”

  “That wasn't me!” She snapped at him. “That was the Empire. I think they were planning on rescuing everyone from their own trap, and becoming heroes. Then when the crystal mine was finally rediscovered, they could use that reputation to their advantage. Everything for them has been about finding that mine. It's why they returned to this world.”

  “But again you thwarted their plans by coming up with a plan before they could act.”

  Could that be true? Again Hendrick didn't know. But it explained why the Mythagan hadn't worked out that they could portal in from another world. Not ignorance as he'd assumed. But a plan. And the one thing he did know was that they wanted those crystals. Instead of questioning her about it, he headed over to the fire where the pot was still full of hot water. It was time to get the conversation back to what he'd planned. “Tea? It's only Harvest Green I'm afraid.”

  “That will be fine thank you.” She sat down on the chair on the far side of the table from him and waited calmly for him to serve her.

  “So I guess I should begin with when I realised who you were, and how I knew.” Hendrick put the kettle on the table, set out a couple of cups out for them, and placed a spoon full of the fragrant leaves in each. “And I'm ashamed to say it took me some considerable time. I had so much to work with and yet like the dullest of dullards I failed to put it together.”

  “That is until Sana called the dragons and I saw them with my own eyes. Then things began to fall into pl
ace. Bits and pieces.” He poured the water into her cup.

  “You know that I have bits and pieces of the memories of one of the ancient wizards?”

  “Your mother mentioned it. She said it was making you difficult.”

  “She would.” Hendrick let out a small, somewhat bitter laugh. “But that just means I'm not doing what she expects me to.”

  “But I have more than that. I was raised by the priests of the Abbey of the Benevolent One. And they made certain I had a good education. I know the tenets of all the faiths and the legends. And I have a friend who's a sage. He sees things more clearly than me.”

  “That's not saying much!” Val interjected as he hovered around them.

  “And now thanks to my spells, I have access to ancient libraries.” Hendrick gestured and brought up a window into the past to show her. One that showed a great library from the ancient world of Malthas. It also showed the wizard, when he had been a man, studying in it. Then he brought the window up so that instead of looking at the back of the wizard they were looking at the book itself.

  “So you have some knowledge.” His visitor didn't seem impressed.

  “A lot of it. But more than that, I have wisdom and experience. Not entirely my own experience.” He swirled the water around in the cup and then grabbed the pottle of honey with the spoon in it.

  “Honey?”

  “One spoon, thank you.” She managed a polite smile. “You were saying?”

  “That when I saw the dragons, things began to make more sense.” He dipped the spoon in the pottle, pulled it out and placed it in the cup and stirred it a little. “Actually, it was when I saw the ghost dragons fighting the dragons.”

  “Because they were killed?”

  “Yes. That too. But it was when I saw the ghost dragons against the real dragons. It wasn’t just the relative differences in size and the power. It was how different in nature they were. And then Sana’s clear love for them as she struggled against me to go to them.” Hendrick placed the cup on the table in front of her.

  “The dragons were glorious and magnificent. They were beautiful. So beautiful that they stole your thoughts even as they terrified you. And against them your servants were … well horrid.”

  “Everything about them is … a failure. They're big, but tiny compared to the originals. Strong, but still puny against a dragon. Their shape is dragon like, but still distorted and ugly. They fly, but compared to a dragon, they're clumsy and completely lacking in grace and speed. And instead of blasting fire they shriek. A sound of utter pain and regret.”

  “In every way, they are a failure. And they are certainly nothing you could ever love.”

  “That's not my doing. I did not determine their shape.” She bristled at the implied criticism.

  Hendrick ignored her. “We've been calling them ghost dragons. Some are calling them smoke dragons. The Mythagan call them serpents. They have also been referred to as servants and parasites. But it occurred to me then that what they really are are pale imitations of dragons. Badly drawn paintings of them. Sketched by blind artists or sots. The difference when you see them together, is … striking.”

  “And over the following days an odd question occurred to me – why? Why would anyone want to create such a horrible imitation of something so wondrous? I could understand someone wanting to create a dragon. But not that. Not something so lacking that any artist would want to tear it up and start again.”

  “As I said –.”

  “I heard.” Hendrick held up his hand to stop her and then wondered if he should have done that. He was speaking after all to the Queen of the Dragons. “But then Val reminded me a few days later as I was working, that maybe there was a reason that the artist wouldn't tear them up and start again. Because though the beasts might hate their lives, they still didn't want to die.”

  “But a beast wouldn't care about death. If they understood death, they had to be people. But no one would want to be like that. They would want to be like dragons.”

  “It was then that I understood. Because I knew from the legends that those who had so desperately wanted to acquire the power of a dragon had ultimately been destroyed. Destroyed not killed. A fate worse than death but still not death. And once I knew what they had been and where they'd come from I also knew who the beast was. Who you were.” He picked up the platter of bread and jam and offered it to her. “Something to eat?”

  “So you unmasked me through my servants.” She accepted a slice of buttered bread and poured a little of the runny jam on it pretending not to be surprised by his naming her. “Clever, but mostly annoying.”

  “I keep telling him that!” Val interrupted again. “No real diligence in his studies. And he keeps drinking that accursed ale of his!”

  “Other things began to fall into place then,” Hendrick ignored his friend. “The deals. The disciples made a deal. They agreed to serve you in return for some of your magic. And as always when dealing with a dragon, it was a bad deal. They gave you their service, and you granted them their magic. But with it you twisted them into those beasts.

  “I did not twist them! They asked for the magic of my kind. I gave it to them. What they became is simply what happens when a human soul tries to become something it's not. It's like a candle wanting to hold the fire of an inferno. It melts. And it was not a deal. They asked and I simply gave it to them. I even warned them of the danger. But they wouldn't listen. Your kind seldom does.”

  Was that true? Hendrick didn't know. He hadn't been there. But perhaps he would find out in due course. Now that he had the spells to do it. In the scheme of things though, it didn't matter.

  “Then there was the Mithril wizard – my ancestor of a sort – you don't happen to know his name do you?” Hendrick was somewhat curious about that.

  “Mert El Var.”

  “Thank you. He wanted to save his world from another disaster you had brought upon the Empire. The little crystals. A slow moving disaster that he and the others could see coming to Malthas faster than all the other worlds. And you offered him the knowledge on the condition that he use it to do just that. Another bad deal. He didn't know what the consequences of using that knowledge would be. And he didn't know who he was dealing with. Neither did the others. If they had they might not have made that deal. And if the Vordan Empire had known that you brought the crystals to them, they wouldn't have accepted them.”

  “But you bargained in bad faith as you always do, and they accepted the crystals. All the disasters that Mert El Var and the others had feared, happened, and the worlds of the Empire suffered enormously, before they finally managed to find some answers to their problems.”

  “That must have been a proud time for you. One world almost completely destroyed, another hundred or more going through centuries of chaos and discord.”

  She put down her piece of bread and stared straight at Hendrick. “They deserved it!” Finally there was some emotion in her voice. Anger.

  “No. I doubt that. Maybe some did. But as usual most of your victims werecompletely innocent. Look at Sana. She never did anything to harm you in the least.”

  “She made a deal.”

  “You made a deal with a child!” He raised his voice a little. “A frightened young girl in a bad place who only wanted to escape her fate! And she had no idea what she was agreeing to! No understanding that you would have one of your wretched disciples place his offspring in her! Or that it would kill her in the most terrible way! You even clouded her mind with your magic so that she wouldn't understand those things.”

  “Do not even dignify what you did with that word! That was no deal at all. “Deal” is the word you use to conceal the truth of what you do.” He leaned forward across the table and matched her stare with his own. “If you were honest you would have just grabbed her against her will, had her raped, and used her. Because that is exactly what you did save for the word you use to describe it and the magic you use to conceal the truth from your victims!”


  “She –.”

  “Was innocent!” He raised his voice some more even though he knew he shouldn't. Not when talking to the Queen of Dragons. But then he was angry and caution be damned! Or maybe it was guilt talking, as he blamed her for some of what he himself had done to Sana.

  “Maybe what happened with Sana was wrong.” The Queen of the Dragons sipped calmly at her tea. “But not in the way you think.

  “She made a deal, and she was clear in her thoughts when she made it. And though she was young, my hand was forced. She possessed the one spell that would have ruined my plans. She could call my kin. And if she had they would never have allowed my army to live. They consider them a perversion. An abomination. Soon my rivals would have found me out.”