The Dragon Lord (16 page)

There was no such contact. Instead the crooked fin-gers clutched at the back of her head, tangling in the locks of auburn hair, tilting her face up until Voord could lean forward to kiss her on the lips. A faint scent of some perfume such as courtiers used hung about him, and his breath had been sweetened by the recent chewing of lancemint leaves. Other than that, he smelt simply clean.

And that was the worst of all.

Had he foul breath or his body a sour, unwashed reek, Kathur knew she could have prepared herself better; even though
Kagh’ Ernvakh
had required her to seduce enough men to know that it was those with dirty bodies who had straightforward notions of vice, and the clean-scrubbed sophisticates who were inclined towards what even she thought foul, yet the contrast always shocked her. As Voord shocked her. For though he was fresh and pleasant in his person, his mind was warped and vile.

She could feel his kiss grow more intense, more passionate, and almost by reflex she responded with a pressure of her tongue against his lips. Then she felt his teeth close, and felt the stab of pain, and tasted blood—her blood—and knew that even though her “plea” had been accepted she was still to suffer punishment after all.

Voord’s left hand—talon—locked in her hair as Kathur wrenched away, and she jolted to a halt at the length of his arm. He grinned at her, and there were streaks of dark red on the white of his so-clean teeth, and the glitter in his eyes was like nothing she had even seen on any man’s face in all her wide experience.

“Oh yes, my lady, dear Vixen my own, you
are
to be punished after all. Surely you knew, surely you expected it? Surely you looked forward to it as you did before? And who am I to disappoint a lady?” He was struggling with his own clothing as he gasped the words at her. “I spare you the cord—but I think impalement is appropriate.” He flung her face-downwards on the bed and pinned her with one hand and his straddled legs. “Relax, lady”—a weight of hot bare flesh and icy armor descended on her back and buttocks—”you might even enjoy it. But even if you don’t,” Voord shifted a little and then plunged like a man riding an unruly horse, “I will!”

There was a gasping interval of some few seconds. Then at last Kathur began to scream.

In the street outside, a figure wrapped in a hood and cloak heard the hoarse, outraged, anguished shrieks. And wrapped the cloak a little closer and perhaps shivered in sympathy, and waited until the three men counted into the house had become three men counted out of it even if the waiting took this whole foggy night. But did nothing else at all.

• • • *
      

It was stolen, then why only one and not both
? Aldric smacked pettishly at the butt of his sole remaining
telek;
there was still no sensible answer to his unvoiced question, and perforce he set the matter aside yet again. Reining Lyard to a standstill, he stood in his stirrups to glance back the way he had come, but could see nothing except the mist, deepening to fog that darkened to blackness and night. And yet…

He was certain that somebody was watching him.

It was gloomier here than he had expected. Oh, an unlit city was as dark as any place not actually buried beneath the earth had right to be, but Imperial cities were not unlit. Not, at least, in normal circumstances. But at some recent stage in Tuenafen’s past, some political group had felt it necessary to their cause to smash nearly all the doorway lanterns in the seaport’s Old Quarter.

Nearly all
? They had probably destroyed the lot, thought Aldric, and what he now saw were the very few which had been replaced. Not that there would have been many to begin with: most houses in this part of the city were eighty years behind such modern affectations. The architecture told him that much; above his head the upper stories of both sides of the street leaned conspiratorially together, so much so that in places one householder could lean out and rap upon his opposite neighbour’s window. Even at midday they would block out most of the light. Now… Now the effect was stilling and claustrophobic. Ominous.

Aldric forced a smile at his own fretting, knowing even as he did so that it would look more like a snarl.

Lyard shifted beneath him; the big horse was uneasy too, maybe uncomfortable on the smooth pavement which had been greased by a film of condensation, or because of his rider’s mood, or simply because he too disliked the fog and dark and oppressive stillness. The courser’s hooves clanked noisily—too noisily, thought Aldric—as he moved into the false comfort of the light from a surviving lantern, itself muffled by the watery yellow halo of fog which surrounded it. He was wondering if he could have spared the extra few minutes needed to load the pack-horse with his gear and—most especially—his armor. But the arguments he provided both then and now were specious, lacking the weight of conviction: bits of equipment and pieces of metal, even such metal as the battle harness given him by Gemmel, were things which could be replaced. Time lost now would be time gone for ever. Time which might well make the difference between…

What and what? There had been more than enough wasted time in the way he had spent the earlier part of the evening, enjoyable though that had been.

Aldric’s gaze flicked from side to side, taking in what meagre detail he could see through the darkness and the drifting fog. Potential ambush points, escape routes and the like.
Escape routes
!—and myself none too sure of even how to get back to Kathur’s house! His hand freed Widowmaker from where she rode obliquely across his back and secured the
taiken’s
scabbard at his hip before he gathered up the reins again and kneed Lyard forward. And if there was moisture in the palm of that ungloved left hand, then surely it was because of the foggy moisture in the air and no other cause at all.

Then…

A clock somewhere nearby ground harshly into life and began to strike for the hour—many, many minutes late, though Aldric at that instant was in no fit state to notice it. The sudden noise had shocked his highly-strung, already nervous mount and sent the stallion skittering sideways.

Towards the ragged granite facing of a wall.

Aldric saw the stonework loom out of the mist and spat an oath; then kicked his nearside foot out of its stirrup-iron and up across his saddlebow before foot and leg together could be crushed, and twitched back on snaffle-bitted reins to get the warhorse back under control before his flank ground into the fanged abrasive surface. Lyard stopped instantly at the brief pressure on his velvet mouth; nothing more was needed. His rider disliked and was loudly critical of the vicious metal used by some who styled themselves horsemen to dominate their steeds. Aldric had not time for such brutalities as spade or curb or bradoon, and held that schooling was of more value than the infliction of pain. His opinion was justified now.

As he leaned forward to gentle the Andarran, and to coax calm into himself as much as the horse, Aldric admitted privately that it would take just one more fright like that—whether real or false—to send him wheeling about on another route. Any other route but this one. Yet to retrace his steps—a necessary evil, if he was to reach the last junction he had crossed—would bring him back to a certain high-walled courtyard which seemed now, as it had never seemed before, an ideal place in which to set a trap.

But it was not the only ideal place in Tuenafen.

As if summoned by the striking clock and the clattering of Lyard’s hooves, boots slapped the wet paving-stones behind him: many feet, running men closing on him fast. And a voice: “
Dah’te ka’ gh, hlens’l! Doch’taü-hal”
It spoke in Low Drusalan and its words were an all-embracing order to stop, dismount, drop all weapons. Surrender. And they were enough to send Aldric’s sole stirruped heel—the other still around his pommel where it had been hooked clear of the wall—jabbing into Lyard’s flank. The horse responded like a clap of hands, snapping from immobility to a surge of acceleration towards the concealing darkness of the nearest alley.

Lyard’s laid-back ears were barely tickled by the rope stretched taut across its entrance, so precisely had its height been calculated.

But it caught Aldric across the chest and plucked him clean out of his saddle in a single uncoordinated backward roll, pitching him winded to the wet ground with a flare of shrill stars inside his skull where his brain had been. Black against the gray of the foggy night, a weighted net whirled down towards him, opening like a predatory spiderweb just before its mesh enveloped him in clinging folds.

Aldric flopped backwards onto the ground with the criss-cross pattern of the net-cords harsh against his face, and fury spasmed through him; fury at whoever had set this up, fury at the delay for which he and he alone was to blame and which had brought him to this, floundering like a landed fish in a Tuenafen street. Blind, crimson fury whose heat would not be quenched without the shedding of blood. His, theirs, anybody’s!

Had Isileth been drawn he might have cut the net, might have butchered the men who even now drifted silently out of the shadowed fog, might have escaped… But the longsword was still sheathed, her presence a dull pain against his side where he had landed awkwardly on the loops and bars of her hilt. He could not touch her; and when some swine pulled on the drawline and the net tightened its embrace, he could not even move enough to ease the ache.

When they loosened off the mesh he kicked a few times, uselessly, and then gave up as heavy hands were laid on arms and legs to tie them up in what seemed an entirely excessive quantity of rope. Even to Aldric’s dazed mind, coherent thought still fighting for precedence against the swirling sparks of mild concussion, all this care and consideration seemed overly elaborate. An arrow from the darkness would have been much more efficient.

And then as his wits began to trickle back and things fell into place, confusion was replaced by the beginnings of fear. He was to have been held in Kathur’s embrace until he was collected by… someone. Her servant’s attempt to kill him could be dismissed; it was not a part of the pattern. But now he had been captured and secured virtually unhurt. For someone.

Who? And why?

These men were dressed in gray; they wore hoods and masks; like
tulathin
, the Alban mercenary assassins. And that realization was as horrifying as any, for Aldric started to remember all the people—or the friends, supporters and surviving relatives of people—who might pay the sort of money
tulathin
demanded, just .to have him caught alive, unharmed and healthy.

Just to make his death their personal and very lingering pleasure. There were several such—too many for just one man.

Despite the chill of the night a droplet of sweat coursed down his face. They had taken all his weapons by now, including the three hidden daggers which were evidently not hidden well enough. And the spellband with the Echainon stone set into it, which no more resembled a weapon than his crest-collar. They checked that too, and the scar across his cheek, studying them by the light of a dark-lantern and comparing all with a sheet of paper one man held in his hand. Everything was done without a surplus word or gesture, although one cuffed him across the face when he attempted the only action left open to him and tried to bite. It was a petty gesture—on both sides—and the retaliation was no reassurance. It was far too gentle.

“Close enough! He’ll do. Take him.”

A hood dropped over Aldric’s head; no mere blindfold, it reeked with some soporific drug. He was growing, if not familiar with, then at least accustomed to the offhand, casual employment of such things within the confines of the Drusalan Empire. It was as if, forbidden sorcery except where the granting of permission was convenient to those in power, men who would have been enchanters had instead become apothecaries and chemists, jugglers not of power but of poisons. As he breathed the aromatic reek within the bag, Aldric’s mind went back five years to the last time he had smelt this smell.

Then
... He was armored to the neck—Heaven and the Light of Heaven alone knew where his helmet was—and he lay flat on his back as he lay now, but instead of stone pavement beneath him there was grass, and instead of gray
tulathin
looking down at him he could see his brother Joren. There was concern on the big man’s face. Behind and beyond was the wreckage of an assault-course jump; Aldric’s horse was grazing unconcernedly a little further on. And there was pain.

Pain like and yet unlike that he felt now—a grinding, gnawing pain which worsened when he moved. Aldric tried to lift his head, but it seemed as though there was some great weight strapped to his brow, pulling him back and down. Someone—
was it Joren
?—leaned over him and slipped darkness firmly past his eyes. The same someone fumbled to hold that darkness shut beneath his chin. “I fell off,” Aldric tried to say apologetically, “and I think I’ve broken…” The words in his head came out as no more than a drowsy mumble, but he made no attempt to correct them.

As the drug took effect, he did, and saw, and knew, nothing more at all.

Kathur lay where Voord had flung her at the last, after he was sated, after all that fevered, slimy, endless night. She was sprawled inelegantly across her bed— a bed which she would hack apart with her own hands if need be, rather than leave it and the memories it contained under her roof for one more day. And except for the bloodied, befouled, sweat-streaked tatters which had once been silken quilts, she was naked. Against her stripped skin she could feel the obscene pressure of the pillows which Voord had wadded into place to give support to and prevent retreat from his inclinations of the moment: beneath buttocks, beneath belly, behind head. And she wept.

Kathur’s tears were not those of shame, even though she felt it for the first time now in five years as a first-rank courtesan; no, these tears were born of the harsh sobs which racked her, sobs which held more of frustrated rage than anything else. She had been terrorised, agonised, subjected to a cynical and systematic degradation, and she knew that there was no way in all the world that she could gain requital for it. The Drusalan woman dabbed a wincing hand at her mouth for perhaps the hundredth time since Voord’s laughing departure; a mouth once merely lushly full and the color of ripe cherries, but now puffed and split and bruised plum-purple. She felt that she would never be truly clean again.