The Dragon Lord (13 page)

And if so, then what did that make her?

The thoughts tumbled through her mind like images glimpsed on the flicking pages of a thumbed book, so swift as to approach the subliminal. And during those few seconds the Alban’s one-eyed gaze remained locked with hers until at last she looked away, almost flinching from the expression on that part of his face which she could see. It was an expression Kathur had not seen before and would as soon not see again, for it seemed cynical, knowing and cold; and it made her feel truly apprehensive of him for the first time in their brief acquaintance.

No. More. It made her feel afraid.

And yet there was another side to the coin, another reason for her to be frightened which had nothing to do with any threat Kourgath-eijo might pose to her. Rather the reverse. There was a warm, delicious quivering within her that was more than the familiar aftermath of loving. Much more; she knew that sensation well enough to recognise that this was somehow different. It went beyond the physical, beyond a fever in the flesh and into something which she knew was impossible in so short a time. But which was also unmistakably true.

She was becoming involved.

It was a sense such as she had not felt for any man since… since a very long time ago. A sense of responsibility, a feeling that might in time become—Kathur shied away from letting the word form in her brain—love. It was a sense she neither understood nor wanted.

The idea of disobedience crossed her mind for the first time ever, and brought in its wake a nauseating spasm of terror. Disobedience would mean a reckoning later— with Lord-Commander Voord.

But if she obeyed, as she had always done before; if she followed her orders, as she had always done before… Then she would have to meet her own eyes in the mirror forever afterwards, and admit to the guilt and the betrayal and the dishonor she would see reflected there.

She was thinking the unthinkable. And she did not know why.

But had she thought to search amid the tangle of Aldric’s discarded clothing, the Drusalan woman might have found a reason for such unlikely thoughts as those which troubled her so deeply. For there, concealed from sight in a tunic pocket yet close enough for her to touch had she known of its presence, was the spellstone of Echainon.

Had she known, and had she touched, she would have found the crystal’s surface strangely warm against her skin. Not hot, not painful, but comforting as the sun on a summer day or the body of a lover in the night. And had she thought to listen she might even now have heard the song of the stone, a melodious humming half-heard on the outer edges of awareness; the sound never heard by concentration, only by chance.

Had she known, or heard, or touched, or merely looked, she would have found the crystal suffused with a misty blue radiance from the hair-fine spiralling of sapphire flame deep down at its core; and that above all would have answered her unspoken question as to the source of her strange thoughts. For the spellstone’s light pulsed with a rhythm Kathur would have recognised at once.

It was the beat of her own heart.

Two men walked slowly through the twilight along a fogbound road.

Slowly, for one was no longer so strong as his burly appearance might have suggested, and his face wore the gray, haggard look of a man recovering from a grave illness.

Slowly, because the other was white-bearded, old, and moved as if every one of his many years was a lead weight borne in the pack strapped to his drooping shoulders. He leaned heavily on the black walking-stave in his right hand—yet at the same time appeared to cringe away from any but the most necessary contact with it. As if the thing was hot and had burned him painfully, and was only awaiting its chance to do so again. There were beads of moisture on his forehead which had not condensed from the fog.

Suddenly—but with a note in his voice which bespoke resigned anticipation—he cried out and dropped the staff with a clatter to the ground. Both sounds were flat and dead, muted by the fog-thick air. He stared at the fallen staff with something close to loathing on his bearded face, but made no move to pick it up. Instead he looked wearily at his companion.

“Again?” asked ar Korentin. There was sympathy in his voice.

“Again.” Gemmel rubbed his hands together, trying to soothe away the burning nerve-deep pain. “It keeps on drawing power. On, and on. Never so much at once as to do me lasting harm, always with enough rest between times for me to recover. And then… !” One booted foot shifted as though he considered kicking the fallen Dragonwand; then settled again as he plainly thought better of the idea.

“Why? What does it want with so much power?”

“Your guess, Dewan, is as good as mine. And I don’t know. It no longer obeys me. You saw that on the beach in Alba.”

“Then give it what it wants,” said Dewan savagely. “Give it more than it can swallow. Choke it to death!”

“No! I think not. I have no idea what Ykraith’s capacity for stolen energy might be—and I’m frightened to find out. Because I might not survive the experience.”

“Then…” The Vreijek hesitated, his brow furrowing as he tried to make sense of the alien concepts of sorcery in a mind not trained to its rules of logic, before committing his idea to the irrecoverable spoken word. “Then
give
. Not much: just that little you say it always takes, that it has always taken before, despite all you do to prevent it. This time, don’t resist.”

“An interesting proposition.”

“Try it. What have you got to lose?”

“My life, perhaps.” With an open hand Gemmel forestalled Dewan’s protest—if protest it was, and not another untutored attempt to verbalise the workings of magic. “But as you suggest—I’ll try it. Because anything is better than this. I daren’t use the Dragonwand and I’m growing afraid to carry it—but I can’t just walk away and leave it. Not here.” He stooped to recover the spell-stave, but in stooping caught an odd look of puzzlement on Dewan’s face and hesitated: “What’s the matter now?”

“A thought, no more. Before you volunteer the power it so obviously wants, shouldn’t you try to work out an answer to what I asked before?
Why
?”

Gemmel jerked his hand away from the Dragonwand as if it had changed to a venomous serpent, and the glare he directed at ar Korentin was equally venomous. “You contradict yourself as easily as my son!” he snapped. “Do… then don’t do. Make up your mind!”

His earlier reply to that same question—that Dewan’s answer would be as right or wrong as his own—was not…
quite
... true. Because Gemmel’s mind’s eye could recall the summoning on Dunacre Beach as clearly as if its colossal bulk was hanging overhead right now. A summoning whose form was not that which he had intended, but which was most shockingly appropriate to the name and nature of the talisman which he had used. A dragon. Summoned by Ykraith.

The Dragonwand.

Gemmel lifted the spellstave with his left hand—the one which didn’t hurt—and stared at the design which patterned it from end to end as if seeing the inlay of adamant and gold for the first time. Or as if gaining a new insight from its shape. And he wondered.

Then in fear and hope, not knowing which feeling was the stronger, he supported the talisman’s dark length on the palms of both his outstretched hands and built the structure of an opening-charm in the forefront of his mind. And let his power, that concentrated inner selfness which made him a sorcerer first and foremost, rather than a harper or a scholar or so many other things—although he was all of these and more—let his power surge through the opened channel into the fireshot dragon-shape that was Ykraith.

This time there was no pain. Only a sensation of warmth on his open hands, and a slight tiredness. That was all. Gemmel raised his eyebrows and turned to ar Korentin with the beginnings of a smile on his face. It was a wary smile, but for all that it was a smile which the Vreijek felt justified in echoing.

“Was I right?” he wanted to know.

“Well done, the untrained mind! Maybe sometimes I’m too subtle for my own good. Yes. You were right. It didn’t hurt me—and it didn’t drain more than I offered, even though the channelling was wide open.”

“So what use can it make of the power? Have you answered that yet?”

“I think so. Dewan, you know as well as I what this talisman is called; and where it came from. And what else was there.”

Ar Korentin’s jaw sagged slightly and his gaze jerked south and west, towards the distant sea lost in the mist and the yet-more-distant island lost over the unseen horizon. “Ymareth!
Vakk’schh ke’hagh trahann’r da
?”

“No, not awakening. It is awake already; indeed, it has slept lightly if at all since the day that Aldric took this,” he patted the Dragonwand, “from the Cavern of Firedrakes on Techaur. That young man gained a deal more than he can imagine when Ymareth—”

The spellstave hummed softly, a vibration more felt in the air than heard aloud, and he fell silent. Both men stared at the talisman, Dewan with awe and wonder, Gemmel with anticipation. Neither was disappointed.

There was a soft, expulsive sound like that of a great breath held in too long, and white force burst from the crystalline .flame of its carven dragonhead to hang like a captive star between them, bleaching the fog to silver upon which their shadows were smeared with the clarity of charcoal on new paper. A surge of power which even Dewan felt pulsed outward, an unseen ripple in an unseen pond. An instant later there was only the afterglow of a bolt of energy which had ripped through the fog with stunning speed and fled out of sight to leave the dull day duller yet. But both had seen the direction of its flight. South and west. Towards the sea and that which lay beyond.

“Lord God,” breathed Dewan ar Korentin, with respect and disbelief all mingled with the oath.

“No,” Gemmel corrected him, and if he smiled the sad smile which his voice suggested, it was gone when Dewan saw his face again. “Not ‘Lord God’ at all. Lord Dragon.”

The island had never been an inviting place, not even in the time when it was lush and green with growing things. That time was long past. Now it was black and gray and desolate. What few trees remained more than a memory were charcoal stumps. All else was ash and blasted naked rock.

A thin plume of smoke drifted lazily from the island’s solitary mountain, vented in gusts like exhaled breath from the yawning crater where once its tapered peak had been. But there was no other sign of a convulsion in the bowels of the earth: no black rivers of once-molten rock, none of the great bubble-pitted cinders flung out by such activity. There was only the aftermath of heat.

And an air of expectation.

As the short evening of late autumn drew night towards it like a cloak, a star began to brighten in the northern sky where no star should have been. As it brightened, so it moved, until this star that was no star was sweeping across the heavens in a glare of light that laid hard-edged black shadows behind wave-crests and fire-scoured rocks alike. Had any been insane enough to anchor in the island’s bay, they would have seen the not-star descend in a great hissing parabola, dragging a tail of silver flame in its wake for all the world like a burning missile shot from some impossibly huge catapult, and they would have seen it plunge with unerring accuracy into the smoking crater, and they would have heard…

Nothing.

The silence was absolute; a silence that could almost be touched, as if it were made of heavy fabric. In the course of that long silence the true stars began to glitter in the void, a scattering of splintered diamonds strewn broadcast on a mantle of black velvet.

Ymareth reared from the throat of the hollow mountain with a whisper of iron scales and the single hard, bright clank of a talon striking stone. Wings blacker than the night were unfurled in the trembling air—a huge, leisurely stretching which could seldom be indulged in the confines of the cavern far below. The firedrake’s head curved up and back on its great sinuous neck, between the canopy of the wings, and was still.

Ymareth waited for the dawn.

• • • *
      

The shudder came from nowhere and from everywhere, a single jolt that was violent enough to bring Aldric’s teeth together with a click. His eyes opened very wide, and had he been able to glimpse their pupils in a mirror he would have seen the drug-shrunken pinpricks dilate to huge black discs which were set fair to swallow all the gray-green pigmentation of the irises around them. But he did not need to see, for he could feel—and it was a feeling that he had known before.

Then it had been caused by his own nightmares, dreams strong enough to shock him from his own determined drunkenness. But this sudden surge of heat, as though hot oil was running through the marrow of his bones: this was stronger still. And he didn’t even know the reason why.

But one thing he did know was that despite the sweet fumes of
ymeth
in his lungs, despite the strong wine coursing through his blood, despite what should have been a heavy lassitude in all his muscles and which was instead a tingling of urgency, he was in control of his own mind again.

And with that knowledge came the shameful awareness of something he had chosen to ignore, or to blame on other things. His own monumental stupidity! He had been duped, he had been dazzled, he had been trapped— and there had never truly been any excuse for it, though he had always found one.

His own failings. Lord God! They were vices that any man—his mind defined it sickeningly: any
honorable
man—should have ignored, as he might the pain of wounds or fear in battle. For the sake of nothing more than his own pride and private dignity.

Aldric felt the queasiness of self-reproach too long held in check come gurgling to the back of his throat like the dregs of bitter wine. His gaze shot to the silken cord which Kathur had pulled—twice, then twice again: a signal without doubt. But how long ago? Seconds? Minutes? Hours? No, a minute at the very most, for he could still remember that strange, reluctant softness stealing into the Drusalan woman’s hard blue eyes just as she turned her face away from his. A minute? He flung himself out of the bed and scrabbled for his clothes.