The Horse Lord (The Book of Years Series 1)

by Peter Morwood

  Aldric wore one of the helmets, smaller and closer-fitting than his own, with guard-plates for neck and cheeks and a peak hinged as a demi-visor to protect his eyes. The rest was part of his lamellar battle harness with its plated left sleeve doing duty as a shield, although in this heat he had left the thick quilted undertunic on the ship. The result looked like discards from the back of an armourer’s shop, yet combined mobility with protection in a way that impressed even ar Korentin.

  Aldric strode off into the undergrowth with the other two hurrying to keep up. Within half a dozen strides the sea was out of sight and nearly inaudible, overwhelmed by a constant whisper of branches overhead and crackle of dead leaves underfoot that confused hearing as fog might confuse sight.

  “Can islands usually support a forest like this?” asked Dewan, more a thought aloud than a question. Kyrin glanced at him.

  “Depends on the size. Techaur’s big enough to weather storms without being drenched in salt water, but…” She looked around and scraped one foot across deep, soft layers of dead vegetation laid down over many years and never washed away. “But I see what you mean.”

  “There’s something not right about this place,” The Vreijek sounded less sarcastic already. “The trees shouldn’t be this big, shouldn’t grow this straight, shouldn’t be this healthy. He thinks it, you know it, and none of us except Barrankal has dared to say it.”

  Once they startled some wild pigs, small and fast, patterned with brown-and-buff like young wild boar, and Dewan saw half a dozen creatures that might have been goats, except for their huge, curling horns. It was Kyrin who found the tracks of another animal in the soft mud near a stream. They were feet with pads not hoofs, and Aldric recognised the pug-marks of a kourgath, the forest wildcat he wore as a crest. Except that this kourgath was three times as big as it should have been, no longer a large house-cat but able to prey on pigs, goats…

  Or anyone incautious enough to let it get too close.

  That was when the sweat and itching caused by armour stopped being such a burden, and Dewan muttered what might have been an apology if it had been loud enough. Aldric didn’t respond, though he felt better. About the armour, anyway; the atmosphere of Techaur Island remained oppressive even when the trees gradually thinned out at the base of a sheer crag whose peak rose almost a hundred feet above them. The cliff was naked rock, seamed and fissured like pine bark, impossible to climb and by the flaky look of it hazardous to stand near.

  “Where now?” Dewan leaned back to see where the wall of stone went then glanced at Aldric. “Up, down or around?”

  “Around. This way.” He walked off and Kyrin glanced at Dewan. So much assured confidence had to be a bluff. Based on what?

  “Better get after him,” said Kyrin. “He might know what he’s talking about.”

  “Care to put money on it? Let’s say twenty in gold?”

  Kyrin listened to the fading sound of Aldric whistling a complicated little tune and thought for a moment. “Let’s say twenty in silver.”

  “I’d have thought you more confident, my dear.”

  “I am confident, just not that confident. Or that wealthy. And I’m not your dear.”

  That was when Aldric’s whistling abruptly stopped in mid-trill. Dewan and Kyrin looked at each other, drew swords and ran. The place where they had last heard the whistle was a clearing, but when they reached it there was no sign of Aldric anywhere: no blood, no crushed grass and no trace of a struggle. It was as if he had vanished, like the isghun, into a drift of hot, still air.

  “You don’t think—” Kyrin began, then jumped backwards as something heaved out of the ground almost at her feet. Dewan lunged forward, sword swinging…

  And hit the dark bronze dome of Aldric’s borrowed helmet hard enough to hammer him back underground. Kyrin dropped onto hands and knees, peered into the dark hole and was greeted by a small, anguished groan from deep inside.

  “Aldric? Are you all right?”

  A set of armour-gloved fingers emerged, clamping round her wrist with a rasp and click like a sprung trap as the dented helmet came back into view. Aldric’s face was pale beneath it, a narrow thread of blood scribbled its way across the pallor, and he glared at Dewan in a way Kyrin hoped he would never glare at her.

  “No, I am not all right. I hurt at both ends and—”

  “I could have split your skull!” Ar Korentin’s voice hid sincere relief behind irritable bluster, and once again held no trace of apology. That might come later, but late or soon did nothing to ease the blur in Aldric’s vision, the beat in his ears and the cause of both. He undid the helmet’s chinstraps, loosened its cheek-guards and pulled it off, then pressed one hand against his aching head.

  “I already know that! If you’ve got nothing better to do than—”

  “Be quiet, the pair of you!” Kyrin cut the argument short before it could begin. “It was an accident, accidents happen, and this is no place for bickering about them. So shut up!” They did shut up, more through surprise than anything else, and stared at her. “Better! Now, what’s this hole in the ground?”

  “Give me some light and I’ll tell you.” Still angry and sore, Aldric waited impatiently until Dewan struck fire with his tinderbox into one of the ship-lanterns they had brought, then took it with him into the pit. Several minutes passed before he reappeared, and when he did there was an odd small smile on his face. “There are steps,” he said, “going downward. This is the way in.”

  “Quite a coincidence, don’t you think?” said Dewan.

  “What is?”

  “You walking off into the forest and finding what you were looking for.”

  “Don’t credit coincidence with much. Remember who sent me here, and what he is. Not Rynert. And not a king.” Aldric watched while the other lamps were lit, winced as he settled his helmet back in place, then led the way down again. Dewan and Kyrin followed him out of sight. For a while after they had gone nothing moved in the clearing, until a small bird landed and began picking for insects in the loose soil turned up near the tunnel mouth.

  Then it twittered in alarm as a gloved hand moved one of the nearby branches aside, and flew hastily away.

  Then one of the nearby branches slowly moved aside.

  *

  Dewan and Kyrin walked down the steps, speculating about who might have made them. There was no reason for their hushed voices, but this place was like a religious house or funeral crypt, and discouraged loud talking.

  After three years in Gemmel’s hold beneath Thunderpeak, Aldric knew he should have been at ease underground. Instead the past days of open sky and open sea made him all too aware of the uncounted tons of rock pressing all around. This tunnel had been here for Heaven knew how long, its arch of walls and ceiling as solid as anything he had ever seen, yet the notion of it slamming shut with the thoughtless permanence of a farmer’s boot refused to go away. Then a movement of the air stroked his face.

  It was warm, spicy-scented, completely out of place, and with it came a sound where no sound should be. A tinkling like tiny windblown bells formed the background for a tenuous thread of melody woven by a flute and some stringed instrument, so faint and insubstantial that even the act of breathing was enough to overwhelm it. Kyrin put her head first on one side, then the other, and frowned.

  “Am I the only one hearing this?”

  Aldric and Dewan both glanced at her, then at each other. If this was imagination, they were all imagining the same thing. Just as they were all imagining the amber light welling up from far below. Aldric extinguished his lantern, and when the others followed suit the glow grew brighter, making them shrink back against the wall with a mental image of something searching for them with luminescent fingers.

  There was a creak of leather and a steely whisper as Aldric released the strap supporting Isileth Widowmaker across his back and secured the longsword to his weapon-belt before he moved on down the steps. A ponderous door blocked the foot of them, massive timbers cross-
braced with black iron and secured with a bar as thick as his wrist. That amber light outlined its frame and edges. Aldric approached as quietly as a drift of smoke, eased the bar off its stops, touched the latch…

  Then released it, moved his hand to Widowmaker’s hilt, and loosened the taiken in her scabbard.

  Anywhere else the tiny metallic scrape would have been almost inaudible, but here, against the background of soft musical tones, the stark, brutal noise dispelled a lethargy he only noticed as it left him. With no other excuse to delay the inevitable, he pressed down on the heavy latch. It released without resistance, creak or even click and swung towards him on silent hinges. Aldric moved aside, took a deep breath, then finally looked out to see what lay beyond the tunnel.

  It was like nothing he could have imagined.

  Bales of rich fabric, fine garments, precious metals both raw and exquisitely worked, jewels and crystalline bottles all lay like litter along the walls and around the pillars of a great vaulted hall. Piles of coins formed snowdrifts in whatever space remained, and there was plenty of space. Live flames fed by an unknown source lit the vast chamber, spilling from the mouths of dragons carved around each pillar, and a great orange-red glare pulsed and shifted at the farther end of the hall. Aldric caught his breath at the unimaginable riches piled here, and at the monstrous magnificence of it all.

  “What is this?” Dewan’s gruff voice befitted a man of his rank and station. Aldric could have told him that rank was no defence against drunken guardsmen, never mind the arrogant splendour of a sorcerous hold like this one, but the Vreijek’s expression proved he already knew it.

  “This is the Cavern of Firedrakes, the lair of Ykraith, the abode of the dragon.” Those mannered phrases seemed fitting for a place where sight, hearing and smell were dazed by the dance of flame on gold, by thin, eerie chords of music, by rare and costly fragrances. Touch and taste begged to be indulged by an insidious compulsion to run fingers through the precious things, or broach the crystal jars which doubtless held wines of noble vintage. It went beyond mere avarice into a heady sensuality close to drunkenness and lust, and Kyrin and Dewan were already reaching out when Aldric remembered words half-forgotten at the back of his mind. They were Gemmel’s words, just one instruction among so many but now laden with terrible significance.

  Touch nothing but the Dragonwand, no matter how tempting…

  “Hands off!” Aldric’s best-modulated voice would have sounded coarse as it cut through the humming music, and this harsh yell of warning rasped hideously. The others jerked as if stabbed by pins and the frightening blankness slowly vanished from their faces.

  “I-I think I said it before, and if I didn’t, I should have. Don’t touch anything. There might be…” He glanced at the gaping jaws of carven dragons and the fires fuming in each. “Consequences.”

  He continued down the cavern by himself, but Kyrin pattered level with him before he had completed five strides. Aldric made a gesture that might have started as dismissal, then smiled and took her hand. From where he stood to the source of the hot light was a long and lonely walk, better made in company.

  Dewan ar Korentin watched them go, then grounded his scabbarded sword and leaned his weight against it as he had learned to do on parade in Drakkesborg years before. He didn’t relax. Despite the comfortable warmth, this was no place for it.

  Aldric and Kyrin could see, as they got closer, how the cavern ended in a lofty plinth with a flight of steps cut into its side. The surface was patterned with sigils of power, and the radiance from its peak splashed flame-coloured reflections across the ceiling, matched by deep shadows on the floor with something half-hidden in the darkest of them. It stopped them both in their tracks.

  Hunched and huge, lean, undulant and elegant, the firedrake lay in the darkness around the base of the plinth. Its wings were folded along its spiked back, the monstrous head rested on slender claws, and a coil of armoured tail wrapped across its nose gave the momentary suggestion of a colossal cat asleep by the hearth. No breathing moved its scaled flanks, none of the legendary smoke drifted from its nostrils. More than just sleep, all seemed dark and still and dead.

  Aldric took a single step forward, then laughed softly with more relief than mirth. That step had been enough to reveal a platform under the firedrake’s body, agate and lapis lazuli inset with turquoise and gold. No wonder the creature seemed dead. This was a thing made by hands and skill, all gleaming ceramic, blued steel and russet copper. The Cavern of Firedrakes took its name from no more than two rows of carved pillars and a rich man’s indulgence.

  “It’s not real,” he said.

  “You sound disappointed.” Kyrin sounded relieved.

  “I’d been expecting something more. This is better. Safer. Maybe…” Aldric’s voice trailed off. He hadn’t forgotten Esel, or that statues weren’t always as motionless as they should be, so he examined the firedrake for several minutes before going closer. Scales like lizard-mail – another uncomfortable reminder – covered its body, complete in every detail from the largest along the spine to the smallest on the flanks. If someone wanted a real dragon this huge sculpture would make a good model, because its unknown creator had portrayed the beast with awe-inspiring realism, if myth and reality had anything in common. With a mental salute to the artist’s genius, he took off his helmet and gave it to Kyrin.

  “You need to stay here.”

  “I’d rather come with you.”

  “You can’t. This is a thing I have to do alone. Spinytail there will keep you company until I come down again.” It was a feeble attempt to ease the tension, and it fell flat.

  “I’ve told you this before, Alban,” she said. “Be careful.”

  He nodded once and kissed her, a brief, tender touch with more than speech could ever convey, then faced the plinth, drew Widowmaker and his tsepan, and went down on one knee with both weapons raised.

  “I swear now by the Low and by the High and by the Ancient Powers,” he said, carefully reciting the long-rehearsed words, “that this thing I do is not my wish or will nor by my choosing, and I call upon these Powers to witness that my oath is true. I, kailin-eir Aldric of the Alban clan Talvalin do swear it by the name which is my own and by the blade which guards my Honour and by the blade which guards my life.”

  He rose, sheathed sword and dirk and went up the steps with a slow dignity that looked nothing like his real wish and will and choosing, which was to make an end of this business as fast as possible and leave the Cavern of Firedrakes far behind before brooding menace became solid threat.

  *

  The tapering plinth lacked a point, and if Aldric had realised how much it resembled a volcanic cone he might have known what to expect. Instead of a flat platform at the top there was only a narrow rim, and beyond it a sheer drop to a roiling pool of molten rock. That was the source of the red-gold light, and the source too of the warmth in the huge chamber, though now it became a shrivelling blast of heat which struck him in the face like a blow. The air danced and shimmered so much it became hard to see, and when at last he made out details in the midst of the burning haze his stomach turned over.

  A column of granite rose from the centre of the churning crater, its upper part carved into the likeness of a warrior wearing antique armour. The outstretched stone hands bore a glinting staff that matched Gemmel’s description of the Dragonwand, but the only way to reach it was a causeway across the void from where he stood to the statue’s base.

  That causeway had neither parapet nor rail, it was less than a foot wide, and its surface was as smooth as glass.

  Anywhere else those twenty paces would be a game for children, a laughing run out and back with arms outstretched for balance. But this place had another eighty paces to consider, the ones straight down to where bubbles burst with hungry belches in liquid rock. Courage was one thing, child’s-game boldness across this insane causeway was suicidal. The only sensible way to cross would be to sit astraddle and shuffle forward on his
backside.

  Yet walking or sitting hardly mattered when just standing on the lip of the pit should have already killed him. A blistering childhood experience in Dunrath’s smithy had taught him how much heat radiated off a farrier’s forge and how far its heat could reach. Charcoal fumes in the forge had made him cough, the smoke had made his eyes water, so why was the air around this much greater forge not too foul to breathe? Why hadn’t he roasted in his armour?

  If Gemmel’s protective ward could guard against the heat and poison of the earth’s own hearth-fires, the man he called foster-father was a greater sorcerer than he had ever dreamed. Sweat formed and trickled on his skin even while heat and wonderment dried his mouth so much that the first attempt to speak came out as a rasping croak. The second attempt, still hoarse, was at least audible above the gurgling mutter of molten rock.

  “Abath arhan, Ykraith,” he said. “Echuan aiy’yan elhar, arhlath ech’hil alauin.”

  The heat died away and even the soft, eternal magma-roar fell silent. Aldric could hear the beat of his own heart again, the sound of his breath and the rush of blood in his ears as he stared at the causeway. Though it was no wider or safer than before, crossing sensibly now seemed wrong, almost disrespectful.

  Aldric took a last glance down, then walked out to the statue as if along a sunlit garden path.

  Its hands were carved to represent fists closed around the Dragonwand, with no sign of catch or hinge or being anything except solid stone. Yet when he gripped the spellstave those stone fingers opened so suddenly that he took a startled, instinctive step backwards. He recovered with a muscle-straining jerk on the very brink of the pit, feeling flakes of rock crumble from the edge beneath his heel. They dropped, were swallowed up, and flared away to nothing. Just as he might have done…