Dragonlinks

by Paul Collins

The alehall of the Muleteer’s Arms fell silent as Jelindel entered. She had not realised what a spectacle she presented, being streaked with blood and grime, and supported by a Verital priestess dressed in gold and crimson robes.

  ‘Which of you are the Mage Auditor’s men?’ shouted Kelricka.

  A purseguard came forward, anxiously wringing his big, meaty hands.

  ‘A man came in here and said the Mage Auditor had just killed two lindraks, but was wounded and needed their help.’

  ‘I – damn!’ exclaimed Jelindel hoarsely. ‘Was he about twenty-five, with deep blond hair and a short beard?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Damn – your pardon Holy Kelricka. Please, could you help me to the Palace? I would not ask unless this was most desperate.’

  ‘My duty and pleasure, gracious Mage Auditor.’

  The palace was undisturbed when they arrived, but the physician came running to Jelindel’s room as soon as he heard the news. By then Jelindel was in a trance and scanning the paraplane’s lights. Only her ears registered the flurry of talk and explanations going on around her body.

  She quickly found three grey globes in the process of degrading a guard spell of considerable strength. Just then the voices of Daretor and Zimak joined the others.

  ‘The King,’ Jelindel said, working her jaw and tongue from the remote paraplane. ‘Three lindraks are attacking him.’

  Footsteps pattered down flagstones into the distance as Jelindel returned to her own body. Only Kelricka and her guard remained in the room as she opened her eyes and sat up.

  ‘Stay here!’ ordered Jelindel as she stumbled out into the corridor, but the Verital priestess and her guard came after her anyway.

  At the entrance to the royal suite’s wing there were palace guards battling other palace guards, and the lepon was shaking something black like a ragdoll, apparently trying to break its neck.

  Zimak had cornered a lindrak and was fighting the lithe, shadow-like warrior with what appeared to be two broken table legs chained together, while Daretor was using twin axes to hold back three palace guards from the door to the Princess’s chambers.

  Jelindel made for the King’s chambers. The door was locked. Kelricka’s guard ran at it, but bounced back from the heavy panels without effect.

  Jelindel went around to the upper cloisters and looked across to the windows of the King’s chambers. A rope hung ready by the light of Reculemoon.

  Leadlight glass suddenly burst outwards, and the shadows in the window seemed to deepen for a moment. Jelindel spoke her word of binding just as a figure leaped. Her blue coils pinned his arms before he could seize the rope, and the cry he gave as he fell was more one of baffled rage than terror. It was cut short by a dull and ominously final thud.

  By now the other lindrak and traitorous guards were dead, and Jelindel shouted to Daretor and Zimak to run down to the little stone courtyard while she stumbled along behind, exhausted and supported by Kelricka. Behind them some guards were using a table to break open the doors to the King’s chambers while the lepon stood guard before those of the Princess Royal. Daretor and Zimak were standing over the lindrak’s body as Jelindel arrived.

  Just then there was a distant crash as the doors to the King’s suite gave way, followed by a howl of anguish a moment later when the guards found the monarch to be dead. This was followed by the shrieking of the Princess Royal as she learned the news.

  ‘There is one more assassin to be found, but to me he appears to be an Adept trying to disguise his aura as a lindrak,’ Jelindel panted as she got her breath back.

  ‘This lindrak’s still alive, but he’s going to croak as surely as a bullfrog in love,’ said Zimak, nudging the ink-black shape with his toe.

  Jelindel bent over the lindrak, whose face was painted with charblack, and bleeding from his fall. For all that, there was something familiar about the face.

  ‘Hullo … little sister,’ whispered the dying youth.

  ‘Lutiar!’ Jelindel gasped.

  ‘Jaelin, what does he mean?’ exclaimed Zimak.

  ‘Jelindel … she is …’ Jelindel’s brother rasped painfully.

  Jelindel stood back. The room seemed to reel in crazy circles. Indecision tore at her. He was part of her that had been inexplicably snatched away. But now … here he was. Lutiar. Flashbacks snapped before her eyes like lightning. Lutiar laughing; Lutiar scaling the east wall and falling, fracturing his elbow; Lutiar being praised by their father for deciphering a particularly hard code; Lutiar … sly Lutiar, over-ambitious Lutiar, lying, social-climbing Lutiar.

  The surprise faded from Jelindel’s face, to be replaced by hate and contempt as she hastily assembled a handful of facts to draw one horrifying conclusion.

  ‘Jelindel?’ gasped Kelricka. ‘As in Jelindel dek Mediesar?’

  ‘You’re a girl?’ exclaimed Zimak.

  ‘So, this is how the lindraks got past the guard spells and bullhounds of our father’s mansion,’ Jelindel said, looming over her dying brother’s face. ‘You let them in!’

  ‘That afternoon, ’guised as some of my student friends,’ he admitted, fighting for each shallow, wheezing breath.

  ‘So they ate with us even though there was murder in their hearts!’ An image of R’mel flashed before her. No wonder he had been so intent on joining the court dance. It was an almost obligatory dance for any banquet attendee, single or not; the one time in the evening when everyone would be in the dining room. The moment to strike.

  ‘Lutiar … was there so much hatred in you? … You had everything!’

  ‘Pah. Second son of … a count. Nothing son. I was stronger, a better Adept, more worthy than … damn eldest. Aye, I let the lindraks in … but then I abandoned them, joined the deadmoon warriors. Deadmoons, they take … only the best, bravest. Proved I was … best, bravest.’

  ‘Brave enough to murder and burn your own family?’ Jelindel cried, nearly hysterical with rage and loathing. But he was her brother! How could his accumulated hatred have manifested itself like this? She strode away from his crumpled body, then turned abruptly and paced back to him. ‘Answer me, damn you!’

  ‘Brave … brave enough to kill a king,’ her brother whispered.

  ‘Stupid enough to miss the Princess Royal, and to miss me.’ She felt the helplessness of life itself. What a waste of a human being.

  He began a low, gurgling laugh, but it quickly became a bloody splutter. ‘Glory … glory to the Preceptor … great teacher. He will unify –’ He coughed, and blood dribbled down from the side of his mouth.

  ‘You’re a girl?’ Zimak said again. ‘No wonder you never pissed with Daretor and me – and what the hell is a deadmoon warrior?’

  ‘So it was you in the D’loom temple four months ago,’ said Kelricka. ‘Students and priestesses swore that they saw you alive, yet the gate guards thought they fought a boy who matched their martial skills. Word spread that it was a shapeshifter, because the real Jelindel could never have fought like that.’

  ‘Six months living as a boy in the market taught me a great deal, Holy Kelricka,’ Jelindel said wearily.

  ‘This secret must remain between us here,’ Daretor warned.

  Lutiar coughed more blood, and gasped sibilantly as he fought for breath. He looked to Jelindel and his lips moved, but he did not have the breath for words.

  ‘He bleeds inside and drowns in his own blood,’ Kelricka said.

  ‘He has nothing more to say that would interest me,’ said Jelindel, tears coursing down her cheeks. She made to stand up but could not.

  ‘But he’s your brother,’ said Zimak.

  ‘A brother who was evil enough to murder his own family.’ Her voice was a monotone.

  Daretor bent over to examine Lutiar. ‘His pulse has ceased,’ he reported.

  Jelindel turned away and was violently sick on the cobblestones, retching over and over again between sobs of dismay and anger. Most of all she resented the shame that Lutiar had brought upon herself and their fa
mily. At least he did not live to see me throwing up, she thought as she sat back on the cobblestones, the early warning signs of a bad headache behind her left eye and her stomach was racked with cramps.

  Kelricka ordered her guard to fetch water, then knelt beside Jelindel and drew her close.

  ‘Mind your robes, holy mistress,’ Jelindel croaked. ‘I’m a mess.’

  ‘Shush, Jelindel, you have done enough and it’s time that others looked after you.’

  ‘No, I’ve one last duty,’ she replied with her eyes closed. ‘Daretor, take your axe and strike off Lutiar’s head. He may be feigning death by some lindrak trick.’

  ‘Jelindel?’ Kelricka said, shocked. ‘He’s of your own blood!’

  Jelindel clenched her eyes shut against the pain. ‘And in my memory he shall always be!’ she said forcibly. ‘But he cut those mortal ties when he … turned.’

  ‘He called himself a deadmoon,’ Kelricka pointed out as Daretor drew his axe again. She shook her head, silently pleading for more time with Jelindel. ‘Was he really a Skeltian lindrak?’

  ‘There are dozens of names for the lindraks; what is one more?’ said Jelindel, who was uninterested in arguing. ‘They look like lindraks, they fight like lindraks and they twitter like lindraks so they are lindraks! Come now, Daretor, make sure he’s dead,’ she said with finality.

  The full consequences of Skeltian lindraks murdering the Passendof King were swift and terrible. All known Skeltian subjects from the ambassador to stallholders in the market were ordered to be seized and executed within a handful of days.

  Daretor could speak Hamarian fluently, and Jelindel could speak eleven languages, but Zimak knew little Hamarian and was inclined to use the Skelt tongue in public without thinking. Thus it was that Daretor spent much of his spare time teaching him basic words and phrases in Hamarian, but they knew that anyone who exchanged more than a few phrases with the blond, wiry youth would know him for a subject of the enemy.

  Being the new monarch, the Princess formally declared war on Skelt, but there was little that a landlocked kingdom with no common border with Skelt could do aside from closing down all trade and slaughtering every Skeltian subject within reach. Some courtier soon remembered that a Skeltian enclave existed right on the very border at Chasmgyle. It was in the free trade and movement zone on Baltorian land, but the Marisa River treaty stated that ‘All persons doing business with either Baltorian or Skeltian merchants should have free and unimpeded access’. The Princess Royal decided that revenge was included in the word ‘business’, and despatched three hundred of her elite royal lancers to destroy the Skeltian enclave.

  Jelindel continued to work in the library of the palace Adept, taking notes in her fine, small script. She made frequent trips to the library of the local Temple of Verity as well, and it was on one of these trips that Kelricka invited her to use their baths.

  After not having gone fully naked for more than a year, Jelindel felt intensely vulnerable as she lowered herself into the warm water of the creamy stone tub. Kelricka was already in the next tub, with soapsuds spilling out onto the salmon-pink tiles.

  Two neophytes took Jelindel’s clothes away to be laundered, while another unbound and washed her hair. In the year since she had cut it the new growth had it down past her shoulders again.

  ‘I have waited a full year for this bath,’ Jelindel said as soon as the neophytes were gone. ‘Sometimes I wondered if I would ever again have one.’

  ‘You have led an incredible life in that year, Jelindel. Who would ever imagine a girl of sixteen surviving while disguised as a youth, killing lindraks, even learning magic to … well you must be at least Adept 9 magic – and without a master!’

  Jelindel thought before answering. It was transparent that Kelricka doubted her Mage Auditor status. ‘Most of that was luck.’

  ‘Luck is no more than being alert for the right opportunities.’

  ‘Luck is also having a fairly thin figure – so far.’

  Kelricka settled further into her suds and warm water and closed her eyes while Jelindel inspected some of the scars and scratches that she had collected.

  Neophytes who were actually older than Jelindel brought in pitchers of warm water and poured them into the tubs so that both overflowed. One whispered to Kelricka before they left again.

  ‘I caught something about clothing,’ said Jelindel.

  ‘No secret is safe from you, Jelindel,’ Kelricka laughed. ‘Your clothes have been washed and are being dried on the thermocal’s stone pipes. Measurements have been taken as well, and a new set is being made in the same style, but of more durable and pleasing fabric.’

  ‘Oh. Ah, my thanks. I – this was not necessary.’

  ‘Of course it was. Tomorrow is the coronation of the Princess Royal, and you have to look your best.’

  ‘Yes, and the Adept 11 will be back tomorrow morning, so that I shall be free to go.’

  ‘Indeed? I shall soon be going as well, to the Great Temple in Arcadia. I leave this afternoon, so I shall miss the coronation. I am taking the aqueduct boat to where the waterway system joins up with the South Caravan Road at Headport. Will you be going by the South Caravan Road, too? We could travel together if you were to overtake me.’

  ‘If fortune allows it, why not?’

  The priestess gestured with a suds-shrouded hand to the rack where Jelindel’s mailshirt was hanging.

  ‘That is very old,’ she said. ‘It is also from beyond our world.’

  ‘From one of the paraworlds?’ asked Jelindel.

  The priestess shook her head slowly, then extended an index finger to point straight up through the skylight in the roof.

  ‘One thousand years ago there was a great war in the firmament, yet it had little effect on our world. There were moving lights in the sky, flashes and sparkles, and then something celestial fell and hit a Hamarian river. It left a flooded crater a league in diameter. A body descended as well, hitting the ground very hard. It was wearing that mailshirt.

  ‘Soon after that, mysterious strangers arrived in search of the body, but the Hamarian prince of the time had burned it by then. His mage-advisors had counselled him that it had fallen from the heavens, and so it should be returned to the heavens as smoke.

  ‘The strangers had swords of lightning and rode black chariot-birds, according to the chronicles that survive from that time. They were shown the ashes from the pyre, and they removed some metal amulets and devices that had been unharmed by the flames.’

  ‘And the mailshirt?’ asked Jelindel.

  ‘They asked about the mailshirt, but the first man to reach the body was a poor carter. He knew that a fine suit of chainmail was worth more than a lifetime of his earnings, so he took it from the body before anyone else arrived. The strangers eventually left, and the carter tried to sell the mailshirt to a local warlord. The warlord had him killed and took the mailshirt anyway. The trouble was that it gave him such strange visions that he soon grew too afraid to wear it.’

  ‘Visions. It would have been complete then. What sorts of visions, I wonder?’

  ‘The obscure texts say no more than what I have told you. After a few decades the warlord’s grandson’s armourer began using links from the mailshirt to repair other suits of mail, and it was found that the individual links and the main body of mailshirt glowed when they were near to each other.’

  ‘Perhaps it was a simple mechanism to allow lost links to be recovered,’ Jelindel suggested.

  ‘Quite probably it was just that. Nobles began wearing them as rings, and very soon it was discovered that the links could draw the fighting skills out of one wearer and bestow them onto the next.

  ‘Several dozen links were removed thus, but they caused such chaos and mayhem that the famous mage Gri-Lagric sealed the remains of the mailshirt in a lead casket and formed the order of the White Lancers. Each of their leaders wore a link on a thong around his neck, and by the glow of the links they managed to hunt down twenty of the s
cattered dragonlinks.’

  ‘I have read a little about Gri-Lagric,’ said Jelindel. ‘He bled green when he died by the knife of an assassin. Perhaps he came from the sky but went about disguised as one of us. Perhaps Thull was another of the sky people as well … but if they are so powerful, why do they not descend from the sky at the head of legions of green-blooded warriors riding chariot birds and wielding swords of lightning?’

  ‘I do not know. However, there have been green-blooded warriors searching here for years in secret, I’m sure of that. You see, if the rightful heir to the mailshirt is a celestial king then he could take it by force from the warrior who finds it, tossing him a mere bag of gold if he were feeling generous. My feeling is that the complete mailshirt is worth more than a thousand bags of gold.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why, oh yes, why? Nobody from this world knows that question’s answer.’

  Jelindel struggled with a thought before she spoke it. ‘If this chainmail has been around for a thousand years … well, I think it odd that the sky people have taken so long to locate it.’

  Kelricka smiled. ‘Very clever. My own idea is that time moves at different speeds in some paraworlds.’ She pursed her lips in thought. ‘The life span of an insect might be several days of our time, yet for the insect it would seem a hundred years. These green-blooded beings might outlive us as we outlive insects. A year of their time could be a hundred of ours.’

  ‘What an unusual idea,’ Jelindel said wonderingly. ‘Yet now that I think of it, I have met some … beings who said that time in their paraworld runs slower than in our world.’

  Kelricka sighed contentedly and slid further into the scented water. ‘Once the old church discovered the links’ potency, they declared them holy relics. The current owners, vain men all, were easily tracked down by their mighty deeds. It has been documented in certain texts that mention of the links was punishable by death.’

  ‘Praise the unknown gods that such chronicles were not lost during the Great Cultural Purge last century.’ The thought churned Jelindel’s stomach. ‘So many learned people – entire cities – sacked and laid waste.’