A Dragon-Lover's Treasury of the Fantastic

by Margaret Weis

  Shadowkiss whipped her blood to icefire and music, but it had lost, and now it knew it. It had bound itself to Ruana Rulane without discovering she held a child’s life as important as a kingdom, and that all the glittering, well-tried gifts in its armory of illusion had no power over her.

  “Make up your own mind, Duke. If you can’t believe me, best try to kill me now. But I don’t lie. And happen there’s work for a blade like this—you’ve got worm on your north, did you know?”

  Vengeance and power, love, glory, and renown—

  “I—What did you say?”

  He’d thought he had only two choices. Kill Rulane Twiceborn and hide the hellblade…for a time. Or failing that, plunge the country into war that spread until no one remembered why he fought.

  But there was a third choice. Trust a hero.

  “Worm,” Ruana repeated with amused patience. “You call it dragon, but it’ll blight a field just as fast whatever its name is.”

  The Grey Duke looked down at his hands as if he could not imagine their uses. Then he looked at the hero.

  “Well. Worms. I can see that requires my immediate attention. Will you use Shadowkiss in my service, then, Rulane Twiceborn?”

  She shook her head in a clatter of ornaments and smiled slightly. “Happen you might think so, but you’ll be wrong. I’ll use it for what’s right, and kind, and mannerly. If you’ll settle for that, well enough, and I’ll be glad to stay.”

  The Duke looked at her, measuring, and slowly smiled. She did not kneel, or offer to.

  “Why not? Very well. Stay with me. I’ll give you anything you ask beside. Even, as they say, unto half my lands.”

  “Oh, aye, as to that, I’m no thief either, and it’s peculiar manners you must have in the south, my hinny. A horse and a bed will do me. Kingdoms are a nuisance, and I’ve already got a sword.” The hero smiled again with acceptance and regret. “And my destiny.”

  Once there were gods, and of their legacy one last touchstone remained. There was only one thing it knew how to do, and in its particular innocence it could not imagine anything beyond that.

  Now it would learn.

  She had wanted the Starharp, and the glory of it was within her grasp. She wanted her own way, and with Shadowkiss she would be invincible.

  Heroes are inconvenient. They have no sense of proportion. Over glory or freedom Ruana Rulane chose instead the peculiar conceit that you did not have to be a hero to matter, but because she was a hero she took up the sword anyway, knowing that for the rest of her life she would have to set her will against that of Shadowkiss every waking hour.

  Even though she loved it.

  It was heroism, though not the sort that makes legends. In a way, Ruana had been made for one task just as the sword had.

  It loved its companion. That was its nature. Even now, it would not betray her. Shadowkiss was bound. There would be world and time, and no escape. Ever.

  Trapped through all the long nights and the empty days to come. Without battle, without war, without any sort or kind of glory—shackled forever to the useless hollow business of work, and duty, and responsibility.

  For an unimportant boy. For the heresy that bread was preferable to destiny, and kindness to high drama. For the knowledge that childhood ends, and that in the end even gifts must be paid for.

  To every seduction it could offer, Ruana Rulane the Twiceborn would ask “Why?” and proud love would compel Shadowkiss to answer, and know its answers scorned. Until in the end it had no more answers, and no more belief in the bright beauty of war.

  And the sword wept.

  DRAGONS’ TEETH

  David Drake

  The sound of squealing axles drifted closer on the freezing wind. The watching Roman raised his eyes an inch above the rim of his brush-screened trench. A dozen Sarmatian wagons were hulking toward him into the twilight. Their wheels of uncured oak, gapped and irregular at the fellies, rumbled complainingly as they smashed stiff grass and bushes into the unyielding soil.

  A smile of grim satisfaction brushed Vettius’ lips as the Sarmatians approached. He did not touch the bow that lay beside him; it was still too soon.

  The enormous weight of the wagons turned every finger’s breadth of rise into a steep escarpment up which the oxen had to plod. They grunted out great plumes of breath as they threw their weight into the traces. Sexless, almost lifeless in their poses of stolid acceptance, the drivers hunched on the high wagon seats. Like the oxen, they had been at their killing work since dawn. The wind slashed and eddied about the canopies of aurochs hide which covered the boxes. Tendrils of smoke from heating fires within squirmed through the peaks. They hung for a moment in the sunset before scudding off invisibly.

  The last of the wagons was almost within the defile, Vettius noted. It would be very soon now.

  Among the Sarmatians the whole family travelled together, even to war. The children and nursing mothers huddled inside the wagons. So did the warriors; their work, like that of the horses tethered behind each wain, was yet to come. Soon the wagons would halt and laager up in the darkness. Using night as a shroud, the reivers would mount and thunder across the frozen Danube. Laughingly they would return before dawn with booty and fresh Roman ears.

  The only picket Vettius could see from where he lay was a single rider slightly ahead and to the left of the wagons. Earlier in the day he might have been guide or outrider. Hours had passed. Wagons had bunched or straggled according to the strength of their teams and the temper of their drivers. Now, while the sun bled like an open wound in the western sky, the rider was almost a part of the jumbled line and no protection for it. Vettius smiled again, and his hand was on the bow.

  The wind that moaned around the wagons scuffed up crystals from the snow crusts lying in undulant rills among the brush. The shaggy pony’s rump and belly sparkled. The beast’s torso, like its rider’s, was hidden under armor of broad horn scales, each one painstakingly sewn onto a leather backing by the women of the family. Across his pommel rested a slender lance more than eighteen feet long. The Sarmatian fondled its grip as he nodded over his mount’s neck, neglecting to watch the bushes that clawed spiked shadows from the sun.

  A sound that trickled through the wind made him straighten; unexpected movement caught his eye. Then the Roman archer rose up from behind a bush far too small to conceal a man the way it had. The Sarmatian, spurring his horse in incredulous panic, heard the slap of the bowstring, heard the loud pop as one scale of his cuirass shattered. After the bodkin-pointed arrow ripped through his chest he heard nothing at all.

  “Let’s get ’em!” Vettius shouted, nocking another arrow as his first target pitched out of the saddle. The trumpeter crouching behind him set the silver-mounted warhorn to his lips and blasted out the attack. Already the shallow hillsides were spilling soldiers down on the unprepared Sarmatians.

  The driver of the lead wagon stood up, screaming a warning. The nearest Roman thrust her through the body with his spear. With two slashes of his short-sword, the legionary cut open the canopy behind her and plunged inside with a howl of triumph.

  Sarmatians leaped out the back of the second wagon, trying to reach their horses. Three legionaries met them instead. Vettius had set fifty men in ambush, all picked veterans in full armor. None of the others had bows—the legate had feared a crossfire in the dusk—but sword and spear did the butcher’s work on the startled nomads. The Sarmatians were dressed for war in armor of boiled leather or aurochs horn, but they had no shields and their light swords were no match for the heavy Roman cut-and-thrust blades. One at a time the nomads jumped down to be stretched on the ground by a stab, a quick chop, or even the heavy smash of a shield rim. Death trebled, the legionaries stood waiting for each victim. The fading sunlight gleamed from their polished helmets and greaves and touched with fire the wheels of bronze and vermillioned leather that marked their shields.

  The legate’s practiced eye scanned the fighting. The wrack showed the Sarmatians had bat
tled with futile desperation. A baby lay beside the fourth wagon. Its skull had been dashed in on the wagon box, but its nails were stained with Roman blood. The oxen bellowed, hamstrung in the yoke. One was spurting black jets through a heart-deep channel. This day was Rome’s vengeance; retribution for a thousand sudden raids, a thousand comrades crumpled from a chance arrow or a dagger thrust in the night.

  Only toward the rear where three wagons had bunched together was there real fighting. Vettius ran down the line of wagons though his quiver was almost emptied when he saw one of his men hurtle through the air in a lifeless somersault. The legionary crashed to the ground like a load of scrap metal. His whole chest and body armor had been caved in by an enormous blow. Measurably later the man’s sword completed its own parabola and clanked thirty feet away.

  “Get back!” Vettius shouted when he saw the windrow of ruined bodies strewn in front of him. “Stand clear!” Before he could say more, the killer was lumbering toward him around the back of the wagon.

  The horsehair crest wobbling in the waning sunlight increased the figure’s titanic height, but even bareheaded the giant would have been half again as tall as the six-foot soldier. Worse, he was much heavier built than a man, a squat dwarf taller than the wagon. He carried no shield but his whole body shone with a covering of smooth bronze plates. Both gauntleted hands gripped the haft of an iron-headed mace. The six-foot helve was as thick as a man’s calf and the head could have served as an anvil.

  The giant strode toward Vettius with terrifying agility.

  Vettius arced his bow. The shaft of his arrow splintered on the monster’s breastplate. It left only a bright scar on the metal. Vettius stepped back, nocking another missile and shifting his aim to the oddly-sloped helmet. The face was completely covered except for a T-shaped slot over the eyes and nose. The light was very dim but the narrow gap stood out dead black against the helmet’s luster. As the giant started to swing his mace parallel to the ground, Vettius shot again.

  The arrow glanced off the bronze and howled away into the darkness.

  Vettius leaped upward and fell across the wagon seat as the giant’s mace hurtled toward him. The spiked head smashed into a wheel with awesome force, scattering fragments of wood and making the whole wagon shudder. As it rocked, the driver’s hacked corpse tumbled to the ground leaving the Roman alone on the seat as he sighted along his last arrow.

  The giant had reversed his grip on the mace. Now he swung his weapon upward with no more apparent effort than a man with a fly-whisk. As the head came level with the giant’s hips, the mace slipped from his fingers to fly forward and burst through the side of the wagon. The titan reeled backward. A small tuft of feathers was barely visible where the helmet slot crossed the bridge of his nose.

  The earth trembled when he fell.

  Shaking with reaction himself, Vettius dropped his now-useless bow and craned his neck to peer over the wagon’s canopy at the remaining fighting. Some of the wains were already burning. Confusion or the victors had spilled the heating fires from their earthenware pots and scattered coals into the cloth and straw of the bedding.

  “Save me a prisoner!” Vettius bellowed against the wind. “For Mithra’s sake, save me a prisoner!”

  He jumped to the ground and cautiously approached the fallen giant. The helmet came off easily when he grasped it by the crest and yanked. Beneath the bronze the face was almost human. The jaw was square and massive; death’s rictus had drawn thin lips back from leonine tushes, yellowed and stark. The nose squatted centrally like a smashed toad, and from it the face rose past high flat eyesockets to enormous ridges of bone. There was virtually no forehead so that the brows sloped shallowly to a point on the back of the skull. Only their short tight coils distinguished the eyebrows from the black strands that covered the rest of the head.

  No wonder the helmet looked odd, Vettius thought bleakly. He would believe in the face, in a man so large, because they were there for him to touch; but he would have called another man a liar for claiming the existence of something so impossible. Perhaps believing in the impossible was the secret of the success of the Christians whose god, dead three hundred years, was now beginning to rule the Empire.

  The trumpeter approached from behind with his horn slung and a bloody sword in his right hand. The torque he now wore was of gold so pure and soft that he had spread it by hand to get it off a dead nomad and rebent it around his own neck.

  “Sir!” he called, “are you all right?”

  “Give me a hand here,” Vettius grunted unresponsively as he tugged at the mace. Together the men pulled the weapon from the fabric of the wagon. Vettius gave a curt order and hefted it alone as his subordinate stepped back. “Ha!” he snorted in disbelief. The mace weighed at least two talents, the weight of a small man or a fair-sized woman.

  He let it thud to the ground and walked away from it. “May the Bull bugger me if I don’t learn more about this,” he swore.

  The doorkeeper had difficulty slamming the door against the gust of wind that followed Vettius into the anteroom. Moist air from the baths within condensed to bead the decorated tiles and rime the soldier’s cape of black bearskin. He wore the bear’s head as a cowl. The beast’s glass eyes usually glared out above Vettius’ own; now they too were frosted and the doorkeeper, turning, shuddered at the look of blank agony they gave him.

  Vettius shrugged off the cape and stamped his muddy boots on the floor. The doorkeeper sighed inwardly and picked up his twig broom. The damned man had been stomping through the muck like a common soldier instead of riding decently in a litter as befit his rank. The slave said nothing aloud as he swept, though; the legate had a reputation for violence and he already wore a dark glower this afternoon.

  Walking through the door of the changing room, Vettius tossed his cape to one of the obsequious attendants and began to unlace his boots. While he sat on a bench and stripped off his thick woolen leggings, the other attendant looked delicately at the miry leather and asked with faint disdain, “Will you have these cleaned while you bathe, sir?”

  “Dis, why should I?” the soldier snarled. “I’ve got to wear them out of here, don’t I?”

  The attendant started at his tone. Vettius chuckled at the man’s fear and threw the filthy leggings in his face. Laying both his tunics on the bench, he surveyed the now apprehensive slaves and asked, “Either of you know where Dama is?”

  “The Legate Vettius?” called a voice from the inner hallway. A third attendant poked his head into the changing room. “Sir? If you will follow me.…”

  The attendant’s sandals slapped nervously down the hallway past steam rooms on the right and the wall of the great pool on the left. Tiles of glaucous gray covered the floors and most of the walls, set off by horizontal bands of mosaic. A craftsman of Naisso who had never been to the coast had inset octopuses and dolphins cavorting on a bright green sea. The civilization I protect, Vettius thought disgustedly. The reason I bow to fat fools.

  At the corner of the hall the attendant stopped and opened one of the right-hand doors. Steam puffed out. Vettius peered in with his hand on the jamb to keep from slipping on the slick tile. Through the hot fog he could make out the figure of the small man who lay on one of the benches.

  “Dama?” the soldier called uncertainly.

  “Come on in, Lucius,” invited the other. He rose to his elbow and the light on his head of tight blond curls identified him. “How did it go?”

  “The interrogation was fine,” Vettius answered; but his tone was savage, that of a man used to taking out his frustrations in slaughter and very close to the point of doing so again. “We didn’t need much persuasion to get the prisoner to tell us everything he knew about the giant. It came from a tent village called Torgu, and he says the shaman running the place has ten more just like; it.”

  “If one, why not eleven?” Dama mused. “But I didn’t think the Sarmatians ever made a shaman chief.”

  “I didn’t either,” Vettius agreed da
rkly, “and that wasn’t the last strange thing he told us about this wizard, this Hydaspes. He was at Torgu when the family we ambushed got there late in the fall, nervous as the Emperor’s taster and fussing around the village to look over each new arrival. He wasn’t claiming much authority, either. Then about two months ago a horseman rode in from the east. Our prisoner didn’t talk with the fellow but he saw him give a package the size of his fist to Hydaspes. That was what the wizard had been waiting for. He laughed and capered all the way to his tent and didn’t come out again for a week. When he did, he started giving orders like a king. Since now he had a nine-foot giant behind him, everyone obeyed. In back of Hydaspes’ tent there was a long trench in the frozen ground and a lot of dirt was missing. Nobody the prisoner knew hung about behind there to see if the wizard really was digging up giants there night after night—they were all scared to death by then.”

  “So a one-time hedge wizard gets a giant bodyguard,” the merchant said softly, “and he unites a tribe under him. If he can do that, he may just as easily become king of the whole nation. What would happen, Lucius, if the Sarmatians got a real king, a real leader who stopped their squabbling and sent them across the Danube together?”

  The white fear that had been shimmering around the edges of Vettius’ mind broke through again and tensed all his muscles. “A century ago the Persians unified Mesopotamia against us,” he said. “Constant fighting. Some victories, more losses. But we could accept that on one frontier—it’s a big empire. On two at the same time.…I can’t say what would happen.”

  “We’d better deal with Hydaspes soon,” Dama summarized flatly, “or Hydaspes will deal with us. Have you told Celsus?”

  “Oh, I told the Count,” Vettius snapped, “but he didn’t believe me—and besides, he was too busy reaming me out for leading the ambush myself. It was undignified for a legate he said.”