The Dragon Revenant (10 page)

“I did, truly.” The fat trader’s voice was a harsh whisper from a poison-burned throat. “I told your men already. I sold him. A spice merchant, Zandar of Danmara.” He paused to cough horribly. “Have you come to kill me now?”

“Naught of the sort. I can smell the poison in your sweat, and I know what it is. Swallow spoonfuls of honey mixed with butter or some kind of fat. It will soothe the pains and sop the dregs up. Since the ben-marono plant kills quickly, and you aren’t dead already, we may conclude that they gave you a less than fatal dose.”

“My thanks. Ai! Baruma is one of your northern demons, I swear it.”

“The son of one, at least.”

With great effort Brindemo raised his head to stare into Salamander’s eyes.

“You!” he hissed. “You’re not one of them, are you?”

“One of whom?”

He fell back, panting from his exertion, and looked away. Salamander smiled gently.

“I won’t force any truths out of you, my friend. If you mean what I suspect you mean, they’d kill you for certain. But in return, I shan’t tell you one word about myself, so they won’t be able to pry it out of you.”

“A fair bargain.” For a moment Brindemo lay still, gathering his strength to speak further. “Ease a sick man’s curiosity, good sir, if you can. The barbarian lad, the one they called Taliaesyn, who was he truly?”

“He didn’t tell you?”

“He didn’t know. His memory was gone, completely gone.”

Jill muttered a foul and involuntary oath.

“I see.” Salamander turned grim. “Well, my friend, you had the honor of feeding a very important man. He was Rhodry Maelwaedd, Gwerbret Aberwyn, kidnapped and sold by his enemies.”

Brindemo made a deep gurgling sound, choked, and coughed in spasms of sweating.

“Calm yourself,” Salamander said. “You didn’t know the truth, so no doubt no further harm will befall you. I take it you know where Aberwyn is.”

“I don’t.” Brindemo could barely choke out the words. “Doesn’t matter. Know what a gwerbret is. Ai ai ai.”

At that his son stepped into the chamber, a big kitchen knife clutched in one hand and his face set in hard determination. When Brindemo muttered a few Bardekian words, he blushed in embarrassment and set the knife down on the windowsill.

“This Baruma?” Jill said to him. “Tell me what he looked like. Your father can’t keep talking. He needs to rest.”

“He was a fat man, you would say porklike, I believe, in your tongue. Very very strange skin, very smooth, and his black hair and beard are always shiny and oiled down. He wore a silver beard-clip, too, and his eyes were like a snake’s, very narrow and glittery and nasty.”

“What do you remember about the slave called Taliaesyn?” Salamander turned to the boy. “Everything you know.”

“There was little to know, sir. We thought he was noble-born because he moved like a knife-fighter, and all your lords are soldiers. He remembered he was a thing called a silver dagger, but naught else about himself.” He glanced at his father, who whispered out Zandar’s name. “Oh truly, the caravan. It was going south. That was ten days ago. Zandar works his way through all the villages and so on to the south coast. He sells spices to the cooks.” He thought for a moment, apparently struggling with the not very familiar language. “The name of the drug in your tongue, it is … um, opium, that’s it! Baruma was giving him opium. Taliaesyn was very thin when we bought him, too.”

“Baruma is going to pay for all this,” Jill said quietly. “He is going to pay and pay and pay until he whines and screams and begs me to kill him and put an end to it.”

“Jill!” Salamander gasped in honest shock.

Brindemo laughed, a tormented mutter.

“My blessing to you, lass,” he whispered. “My humble but honest blessing.”

Salamander started for the door, then paused, looking back at Brindemo.

“One last thing. Why did Baruma do this to you?”

“I disobeyed him. He said to sell Taliaesyn to the mines or the galleys. I sold him instead to the decent master.”

“I see. Well, that act of mercy’s cost you dear, but you have my thanks for it.”

All the way back to their inn Jill burned with rage, and that burning translated itself to her vision, until it truly seemed that pillars of flame danced ahead of them through the streets. Although he kept giving her worried looks, Salamander said nothing until they were back in their chamber and the door safely barred behind them. Then he grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her.

“Stop it! I don’t even know what you’re doing, but stop it right now! I can feel power pouring out of you.”

“I was just … well, seeing things again. I don’t know how to stop it.”

Yet the shaking and his very real fear had already snapped her mind back to a more normal state. The flames were gone, although the edges of everything in the room still shimmered with silver energy.

“Then don’t start it in the first place.” Salamander let her go. “Jill, you get to brooding on things, though I can’t truly say I blame you, mind. But, well, how can I explain it? When you brood, you summon power, because you have a dweomer mind, deny it all you want. When most people brood over things they see pictures in their mind or hear the voice that they consider their self talking, but it all stays in the mind where it belongs. When you’ve got this raw power pouring into you, you begin to see the pictures and so on outside of your mind, don’t you?”

“I do.” She made the admission reluctantly. “I saw fire running before us down the street.”

“Well, that’s cursed dangerous. Dweomerfolk see images, too, and work with them, but we’ve learned how to control them. If you go on blundering around this way, you could go stark raving mad. Images and voices will come and go around you of their own free will, and you won’t be able to stop them.”

Since she could barely control them even then, she went cold all over at the prospect. With a dramatic sigh Salamander sprawled onto the cushioned divan.

“Food,” he said abruptly. “Eating somewhat generally helps shut things down. It’s tediously difficult to work any dweomer on a full stomach. Drink dulls the mind right down, too. But I doubt me if that’s going to be enough. I’ve no right to do anything of the sort, but I’m going to have to teach you some apprentice tricks of the exalted trade.”

“And what makes you think I want to learn them?”

“Your basic desire to stay sane and alive, that’s what. Don’t be a dolt, Jill! You’re like a wounded man who’s afraid to have the chirurgeon stop his bleeding because pressing on the wound might hurt.” He paused, and he seemed to be studying the air all around her. “Well, you’re too worked up now to try a lesson. How about food, indeed? The Great Krysello is famished. If you wouldn’t mind assuming your guise of beauteous barbarian handmaiden, go down and ask the innkeep to send up a tray of meats and fruits. And a flagon of wine, too.”

“I’m hungry myself.” She managed to smile. “Oh mighty master of mysterious arts.”

Salamander was certainly right about the effects of food on her visionary state of mind. As soon as she’d eaten a couple of pieces of meat and some cracker-bread, she felt a definite change, the dulling, as he’d called it, which she needed so badly. Although the colors in the room seemed unusually intense, the constant shimmerings disappeared. A couple of glasses of sweet white wine finished her involuntary dweomer-working completely.

“When are we getting on the road?” she asked. “I wouldn’t mind leaving tomorrow, when the city gates open at dawn, say.”

“I know your heart burns with impatience, Jill my turtledove, but we must consider what Zandar, prince of the spice trade, is going to do next. Mayhap he’s heading home to Danmara, mayhap he’s traveling this way and that about the countryside, unloading his goods upon the commerce-minded public. If he is, we could be going one way while he’s going the other. If we go to Danmara to wait for him, we could sit around there for weeks. On the other hand, we can’t sit around here either, doing naught while evil villains scheme, plot, work wiles, or even machinate. Whichever way we go, we’ll have to travel slowly, stopping often to perform, like the showmen we call ourselves.”

“Well, true spoken. We’ve got to get some coin before we go anywhere, though. I can’t believe how much you’ve spent!”

“Good horses are not cheap in this rare and refined land.”

“We haven’t even got the horses yet, you wretched wastrel. Our show had best go well tonight, or you’re in for it.”

From a couple of jugglers Salamander had learned that any showman was welcome to perform in the public squares, provided he turned a quarter of his profits over to the archon’s men. When it grew dark, they hauled their newly acquired props down to the market, which was just coming alive again in the cool. Oil lamps flickering among the gaudy sun-shades and banners cast colored shadows on the white buildings, while the merchants and their customers stood in little groups, talking and joking over cups of wine and snacks of spiced vegetables wrapped in fresh-baked rounds of thin bread. After a little asking around Jill and Salamander set up on the terrace at the top of a flight of steps leading to a public building. While Jill laid charcoal into the braziers and sprinkled it with incense, Salamander spread out the fancy carpet, then picked up the cloth-of-gold drape and began doing tricks with it, making it swirl in the air and catch the light, or suddenly turn stiff and billow out like a sail before the wind. Down below a crowd gathered to watch.

“I am Krysello, Barbarian Wizard of the Far North. Look upon my marvels and be amazed!” He flicked the drape one last time, then let it settle on the steps. “Jillanna, my beauteous barbarian handmaiden, and I have traveled far across the seas from the wondrous kingdom of Deverry to amuse, delight, and mystify you with magic that your otherwise splendid city has never seen before.”

By now some fifty people were gathered at the foot of the stairs. Salamander slowly raised one arm and pointed at the first brazier. In a perfumed tower flames leapt up high, then fell, leaving the charcoal burning red and the sweet resins smoking. When the crowd gasped in honest awe, other people came running to see. Salamander waited until the crowd was steady again to light the second brazier.

“Shall I proceed with my humble show, oh good citizens of Myleton?”

The crowd laughed, dug into their purses, and flung a shower of copper coins. Jill scooped them up, then took a place out of the way as the Wildfolk of all sorts flocked to the improvised stage and clustered around Salamander. Her gray gnome appeared, did a little jig of excitement, then jumped to her shoulder and settled down to watch.

“Now behold the marvels of the north!”

Salamander pulled a long silk scarf out of midair—or so it seemed—and began to do the ordinary sort of tricks that any sleight-of-hand artist might do. First he made it disappear, then pulled it out of Jill’s hair; he tossed it up in such a way that it looked like a bird, flapping down to his shoulder; he turned it into three scarves, sailed them around his head, then held them up to show that they were mysteriously knotted together. All the while he sang, snatches of a long wailing elven war chant, bits and pieces of Deverry ballads, and fragments of songs in some guttural tongue that Jill thought might have been Dwarvish. After a few minutes he switched to doing stunts with silver coins—again, just standard trickster’s fare. He wanted to impress upon the crowd that he was only a showman and nothing more, to plant in their minds the idea that there had to be a rational explanation for everything he did.

Finally, when they were starting to get restless, Salamander flung up his arms and sent a glowing waterfall of many-colored sparks high into the air. As it poured down in a double rainbow, the crowd shouted and surged closer, a sea of sweaty faces in the rippling light. With a howl of elven delight Salamander drifted great red-and-blue washes, shot with silver and gold, across the stage, then followed with miniature lightning bolts and thunder growls. On and on the show went, with bursting flowers of light in many colors and purple cascades, while the crowd sighed and gasped and Salamander alternately sang and joked. When Salamander announced that he was growing weary, the crowd threw another rain of coins, and most of these were silver with here and there a gold. After some juggling tricks with hen’s eggs, he gave them another good display of real magic, then announced that this time he truly was weary and the show was over. Still, a good many more coins came their way.

As the crowd drifted away, still talking over the marvels they’d seen, one of the archon’s men—he had the city crest painted on his cheek—appeared to claim the official cut. While Jill rolled up the carpet and folded up the cloth-of-gold, Salamander sat down with the official near a brazier to count the haul.

“That was the best show I’ve seen all year, wizard. Just how do you do it? Some kind of powder in those braziers?”

“Oh, not at all. It’s all true magic, as taught in the barbarian kingdoms.”

“Well, it’s not fair of me to pry into your secrets. It would only spoil the fun if I knew how the tricks worked. But still, I’ll bet that handmaiden of yours is scattering all sorts of chemicals across the stage when everyone’s watching you juggle. I see that robe of yours has good deep sleeves, too.”

Salamander merely smiled, but the Wildfolk scowled and stuck out their tongues, as if wondering how the man could be so blind.

They’d racked up so much coin that Salamander gloated all the way back to the inn. Once they were up in their chamber, he danced around, humming elven melodies and dancing in the elven way, head thrown back, arms up rigid by his shoulders, as he swayed and jigged through the piles of props on the floor. Jill had to laugh with him.

“You love it,” she said. “All those adoring female eyes looking up at you.”

“Of course.” He stopped, panting a little for breath. “Here, oh beauteous barbarian handmaid, grab a handful of those coins and go buy us a jug of wine, will you? The Great Krysello is fired with thirst, and we shall celebrate the success of our ruse.”

Yet once the wine was fetched and poured, she found herself thinking of Rhodry again, wondering if he were safe, and if he would ever forgive her even if they did manage to rescue him.