Master of Dragons

Chapter Twenty-One

Yethanial woke suddenly. She had only been asleep for a short time, retiring early after a long and gruelling session at her writing desk. Ever since Imladrik had gone her mind had struggled to retain its focus. She dreamed of him often, imagining him at the heart of battle, mounted on that damned creature that made his moods wild and dark.

Her chamber was still lit by half-burned candles. The windows rattled from the wind, a strong easterly. She sat up, rubbing her eyes. Sleep, she knew, would be elusive now.

It could not go on. She had tried to pretend that all was well for too long. She reached out to the table by her bed and rang a small brass bell.

A few moments later her maidservant entered, bowing as she drew close to the bed.

‘I asked you for word of my son,’ said Yethanial.

‘There has been none, lady. Not for many days. The master-at-arms believes…’ The girl trailed off, uncertain whether she should go on.

‘That he is no longer on Ulthuan,’ said Yethanial. She had come to the same conclusion herself, but unwillingness to countenance it had prevented her from acting. ‘We must accept that he is right. And if he is not on Ulthuan, then there is only one place in the world he would have fled to.’

She reached for a scrap of parchment — there were always several lying close to her bed — and began to write with an old quill and half-clotted ink.

‘I have stayed here long enough, pining like some useless wife. I am not some useless wife. I am a daughter of Isha with the blood of princes in my veins.’

She handed the parchment to her servant. ‘Take this to the harbourmaster at Cothmar. Ensure he finds me a good ship — fast, and with room for a dozen guards. Take my house seal so he knows who asks him. I will travel tomorrow and will be at the quayside by noon.’

The maidservant bowed again, taking the parchment. ‘How long will you be gone, lady?’

Yethanial sat back against her bolsters, dreading the long night ahead.

‘I have no idea. Long enough.’

The maidservant left, hurrying as she went. Yethanial heard her echoing steps as she skipped down the stairs. Soon after she heard the slam of doors and the creak of the great gates, followed by the drum of horses’ hooves in the night.

She hated the thought of leaving. She hated not being in Ulthuan, and hated the thought of a long and dangerous sea crossing. Caledor, had he known, would almost certainly have forbidden it.

Yethanial lay back, pulling the sheets around her. It could not be helped. Even if she had not had such dreams she would have made the crossing, for the sake of her son if for nothing else.

It had always been Thoriol who had drawn them together — he, in the end, remained the strongest bond between them.

One by one, the candles in her chamber blew out, gradually clothing the room in darkness. Yethanial lay there, her mind alert and unsleeping, her hands loosely clasped over the counterpane. Even when the last one guttered out, little more than a pool of wax in the silver holder, she was still awake, her grey eyes shining with resolve.

Liandra shaded her eyes against the horizon-glare. For a moment she didn’t believe it — just another mirage on the baking world’s edge, a false hope born from desperation.

Then it didn’t go away. She looked closer, squinting into the distance. It stayed put, tantalisingly so.

A city. The city. One she had never visited but had known must be close: Oeragor, Imladrik’s own, thrust out into the utter margins of asur territory in Elthin Arvan and raised from the choking desert in defiance of all reason.

Drutheira didn’t say anything. It would have been hard for her to do so with a gag ripped from her own robes wrapped tightly around her jaw. The druchii’s eyes were red-rimmed, her stance slumped in the heat.

Every so often on the long trek east she had fallen, no doubt from genuine fatigue. On those occasions Liandra had waited patiently for her to get up, neither helping nor hindering. The druchii witch didn’t like to show weakness and would struggle to her feet again when she could. With her arms bound tightly, her tongue clamped and her staff shattered she was no longer a threat, just an encumbrance.

Killing her would have given a modicum of satisfaction. Over the past two days Liandra had come close. Once, in the middle of the night as the campfire burned low, she had reached over to the witch’s slumbering form, knife in hand, just a hair’s breadth away from plunging the point into her throat.

It had not been mercy that had held her back. In a strange, shadowy way Liandra felt like the dark elf had been part of her life for a long time, an integral part of the struggling tale of the colonies. Drutheira was a dark mirror to her, a spectral counterpart of Liandra’s own fiery presence.

When she had first come round from her deep unconsciousness, the witch had smiled thinly.

‘So you won,’ she had said, as if that was all there was to it.

It had been unutterably eerie to look into the violet eyes of her quarry. The hatred Liandra felt for her was too intense to generate even a token response. She stayed her dagger-hand, though.

Perhaps she had learned something from Imladrik after all, and saw the larger canvas spread out before her. The witch knew things: she knew why the druchii had been active, why they had been sent, how many were still in Elthin Arvan. Her very existence was the proof Imladrik needed. If Liandra could bring her back to Tor Alessi alive then the dream of a settlement was not yet dead.

All of which, though, meant nothing if she failed to keep her alive.

Liandra hauled Drutheira along behind her on a length of cord taken from her belt. The witch was in a far worse state than her, ravaged by what must have been months out in the wild. Liandra never untied her and never let her speak again, but soon stopped fearing her powers.

The first day was the worst. Plagued by terrible headaches from the sun, progress amounted to little more than putting one foot in front of the other. All Liandra had to guide her was old memories and a vague sense of rightness — like all the asur mageborn she could sense the echoes and resonances of her kind even from immense distances, shimmering amid the aethyr like the whispers of overheard conversations. Many times on that trek she stood still, eyes closed, letting her mind rove ahead of her, seeking out the source of the faint aura of familiarity.

Such work was easier in the absence of Vranesh’s huge influence. With the dragon gone, Liandra’s mind seemed to work more surely. Once the worst of the grief had subsided she found her moods calming down, settling into the analytical patterns required for survival. She still missed the drake’s voice — unbearably so, at times — but it was impossible not to also notice how much freer she felt once out of its shadow.

It wasn’t until the third day that she began to give up hope. The hard land yawned away from her in every direction, a semi-desert of scree, dust and thorny bushes that gave neither shelter nor moisture. Both of them suffered. Drutheira’s eyes were permanently half-closed and puffy, her breathing little more than a soft rattle. They spent most of the morning struggling down a winding defile and having to clamber over boulders twice their size. Only at the end of it, after miles of solid torture, did the landscape finally open up again.

Liandra looked east, and her heart sank: the land was as featureless and barren as the rest. But then she saw them, hard on the edge of her vision: spires, hazy in the distance, glinting like ivory in the sun.

‘Oeragor,’ she breathed. It was the first word she had spoken aloud for three days.

Drutheira stood beside her, swaying, looking like she had barely any awareness of where she was. Liandra glanced coldly at her. ‘They will welcome you there, witch. Always a chamber to be found for the druchii.’

They started to walk again. After the initial euphoria wore off the precariousness of their position reasserted itself. Liandra went steadily, trying not to breathe too heavily, feeling the solid heat hammer at her back and shoulders. She had wound fabric from her cloak over her head, but though it protected her skin from the worst of the sun, it made her feel claustrophobic and stuffy. Every time she looked up the spires seemed to be just where they had been the last time — too far away.

After several hours of trudging she realised she wouldn’t make it. Her heart was labouring like an old carthorse’s. Her throat was so bone-dry she could no longer swallow and her lips were split and bleeding. The towers remained just where they had been all along: within eyesight, still too far.

Drutheira was in even worse shape. When Liandra stopped the witch fell to the ground and stayed there. Liandra couldn’t be sure she was breathing and couldn’t be sure that she cared. She sank to her knees, wondering just how long it would take for the sun to fry her into wizened ashes. There was no shelter, no moisture, just open miles of horrific, bleary, seamy heat.

She closed her eyes. After a while, oddly, she began to feel better. The heat on her shoulders felt a little less intense, the air a little less stultifying. Perhaps, she thought, this was what dying felt like.

She opened her eyes again and looked up, half expecting to see the skies unravelling into waves of pure sunlight. Instead she stared straight up into the jaws of a huge creature, hovering above her on massive wings like a golden eagle’s. A cruel curved beak snapped at her less than an arm’s length from her face. She smelled the tart scent of animal breath on the wind.

For a moment she thought she was hallucinating. Then she saw the rider mounted on the back of the beast — asur armour lined with black and bronze — and realised what it was: a griffon, magnificent in leonine splendour.

‘I would have slain you for a dwarf,’ called the rider, shading her with his beast’s wings. He landed and dismounted, bringing a gourd of water with him. Liandra saw the sigil of Oeragor — a black griffon rampant on an argent field — embroidered on the fabric, and would have smiled if her mouth still worked.

She drank, just a little, letting the griffon-rider hold the gourd for her. The water was cool, almost painfully so.

‘We do not see many travellers out in the Blight,’ he said. ‘If I had not been aloft-’

‘Don’t,’ croaked Liandra. ‘I do not wish to think on that.’

‘And your companion?’

‘Druchii.’

The griffon rider started, hand leaping to the hilt of his sword, but Liandra shook her head weakly.

‘Captive,’ she rasped, forcing the words out. She began to feel dizzy again, and struggled to keep her poise. ‘Bringing… to the city. Take us there. Lord… Imladrik…’

That was all she got out. Black spots appeared before her eyes and she felt her head go thick.

The griffon-rider gazed at Drutheira doubtfully, then back to Liandra.

‘I can take you to the city,’ he said, tipping the gourd up for her again. ‘Though Imladrik is not here, nor has been for many years.’ The rider had a young, lean face, one that was both serious and mournful. ‘Would that he were. I fear you have not found much sanctuary here.’

Liandra drank greedily. She barely heard the words; all she knew was that she had cheated death — again. That made her happy, almost deliriously so.

‘There is little time,’ she said painfully. ‘Use it well. Take us both.’

A fire burned in the heart of the forest, as tall and broad as the great oaks that crowded around the edges of the clearing. It roared and crackled, sending sparks trailing high up into the night sky and skirling above the treetops.

During the journey west the dwarfs had lit no fires, mindful then of the need for stealth. Now that need had passed.

Morgrim’s surviving thanes sat around the blaze, their armour limned a deep orange. Grondil had gone, last seen charging into the path of a golden wyrm, swinging his warhammer wildly around his head and yelling obscenities at the top of his voice. Frei had survived but his arms were both broken, rendering him furiously weaponless. Many others were lost.

Those who remained stared moodily into the flames. Morgrim could see the wounds they had all sustained — deep wounds from speartips or dragon-claws. Frei had lost almost all of his incredibly finely crafted armour, ripped from his back by one of the beasts. He’d been lucky to survive, broken arms or no, though Morgrim knew Frei didn’t see things quite like that.

They were consumed with shame. Their cheeks glowed red, their hands rubbed one another, knuckle over knuckle, wearing at their anguish. The dirges had not stopped; even now Morgrim could hear them from the trees, murmured around lesser campfires by the warriors he had brought to the face of ruin.

As for himself, Morgrim felt nothing but resolution. He had felt it ever since leaving the mountains — only Imladrik’s doomed attempts to halt the violence had shaken that certainty. There was a kind of purity in adversity and, now that they had been so comprehensively ravaged, all that remained was to fight on. There was nowhere to go, no further questions to ask, nothing left but unbreakable stubbornness.

Which is, after all, what we are known for.

‘And so what now?’ asked Frei, his voice thick with weariness.

Morek spat on the earth. ‘Back to the holds. Muster again, then we strike. Like a hammer on the metal, they will break eventually.’

‘No, rhunki,’ said Morgrim quietly. He remained staring at the flames, appreciating the heat of them against his exposed skin. ‘We will not go back.’

Morek looked at him with surprise. To contradict a runelord was rare.

‘What do you think will happen when we return?’ Morgrim asked, speaking slowly, almost sonorously. ‘We could assemble a host three times the size and the result would be the same. The drakk are too strong. I should have listened to Imladrik. I took it for boasting, but he was too noble for that. Grimnir’s eyes, he was trying to warn me.’

The other thanes looked at him warily. They didn’t like talk like this.

‘We cannot fight them like this,’ Morgrim said. ‘We must find another way.’

Frei laughed bitterly. ‘And what way would that be? Can you now fly in the air? Can you shoot flame from earth to sky?’

‘Don’t write that off,’ said Morgrim, utterly serious. ‘But for now? We must forswear Tor Alessi. We must, for the moment, forget the oaths we took there.’

The thanes began to mutter amongst themselves. Even Morek looked perturbed. ‘We cannot forget them,’ he warned.

‘We can let them rest. There are other ways to hurt them.’ Morgrim never took his eyes off the flames. They were reassuringly alive to him, like flickering remnants of the ancestor gods he had worshipped his whole life. ‘How many drakk do they have? I saw six. If others exist, they are over the sea. In one place, those six can destroy any army we create.’

As he spoke he lifted his eyes from the fire and studied the reaction of his surviving thanes. ‘That is the key: one place. They cannot be everywhere. They cannot defend Tor Alessi and Athel Toralien, Athel Maraya and Sith Rionnasc, Tor Reven, Kor Peledan or the hundred other fortresses they have built. If we cannot defeat them in one battle then we shall defeat them in a thousand small ones. We must split ourselves, fracture our armies into pieces. Every King shall lead his host, every hold shall work on its own; no grand host will be assembled, not until the very end.’

Morgrim’s jaw clenched. ‘This is our land. Why do we fight like they do, out under the sky, lined up to face their magics? We are tunnellers. We can melt into the stone, sink back into the soil. We need no hosts pulled together in the open for the drakk to fly at.’

His eyes went flat as he envisioned it.

‘We can mount endless attacks, one after the other, directed at every fortress they possess. They will turn most of them back. They will kill many more of us. But some will get through. One by one, the walls will fall. We can make this world a hell for them, one in which the suffering never ceases. They fight well, the elgi. They fight better than any warriors I have ever seen. But do they suffer well? No one suffers like the dawi. We will make this the battleground — they will be broken on the anvil of our suffering.’

He finished. The silence was broken by the low roar of the fire and the murmur of the dirges. The thanes listened. They digested. They reflected.

Morgrim leaned back, clasping his hands together. They would need time. The High King would need time, as would the other warlords and captains who were already marching towards their future battles. Word would spread out, travelling like wildfire along the mud-thick lanes of the deep forest, gradually spreading from mouth to mouth until the whole world was running with it.

Morek shook his head. ‘I don’t know,’ he muttered.

That was good. A runelord would never simply agree; there needed to be deliberation, debate, rumination. As a start, given the circumstances, Morek’s stance was admirably open.

Morgrim determined to say no more that night. He would listen to the others, knowing that in time his counsel would prevail. He had seen the way the war must now be fought. In time the others would too.

A thousand tiny battles, each one grinding into the bedrock of the earth, each one a new wound on the weary face of the elgi empire.

He was already planning his next move. Before dusk the following day he would be marching. His army would splinter, each shard heading in a different direction, and he would make his own way among them, no longer the leader of many holds but the warlord of one.

He could see the spires of his prey in his mind, rising from the dry lands to the south, the fragile citadel created by his enemy.

For revenge, for the deaths of Tor Alessi, that one would be the first to burn.

Sunlight angled into the marble chamber from high glass windows. Low beds ran along the walls, dozens of them, each occupied by a wounded highborn. Incense burned in suspended thuribles, a soft fragrance of lavender and marjoram designed to mask the underlying tang of blood. Attendants came and went, feet shuffling on the stone, pale robes brushing.

Thoriol lay on his back, staring at the ceiling. His whole side throbbed with a dull pain, worse when he moved. His chest and stomach were swathed in bandages, some of them bloody.

He had only sketchy memories of how he had arrived there. He didn’t remember falling during the battle; he had pushed to the forefront, determined to avenge Baelian’s death. He’d loosed two, maybe three, arrows, thinking that they’d all found their marks.

After that, very little. The dwarfs had been massing in numbers and one of them must have loosed a crossbow bolt at him. He had dim recollections of a burning night, of shouting and hurrying. He’d awoken briefly in a crowded chamber, its floor strewn with bloody straw and smoking candles. Someone had leaned over him, pulling his face around to get a better look. He remembered the pain being much worse then.

Then he’d awoken in the marble chamber with very little idea how much time had passed. His dressings had been changed and healing oils applied to his wounds. The attendants had treated him with the sort of unconscious respect he’d enjoyed as a dragon rider’s acolyte in Tor Caled, not with the peremptory instruction an archer enjoyed.

He tried to pull himself further up in his bunk, to ease some of the discomfort in his side. As he did so he saw two figures approach, and his heart sank.

‘Awake, then,’ said the first of them. The Master Healer was an old man from Yvresse, bald as an infant, prone to smiling, his fingers stained from the herbs he crushed during the night hours. ‘I do not think you will be with us much longer.’

Thoriol ignored him; his companion was another matter.

‘How did you find out?’ Thoriol asked his father.

Imladrik looked tired. Incredibly tired. His skin was raw, as if scrubbed hard with pumice to remove some terrible stain, and his long hair hung listlessly around his face. ‘Draukhain recognised you,’ he said. ‘He can sense the Dragontamer’s bloodline.’

Thoriol winced. ‘Then you brought me here.’

‘Others took you from the walls. I sent for you once I knew you lived.’

‘You should not have taken me from my company.’

‘If you had not been brought here you would have died,’ said the Master Healer placidly. ‘Two quarrels pierced your flesh, one deeply.’

Imladrik turned to the Healer. ‘Thank you, Taenar. I think I might have some time alone with my son now.’

The Healer bowed and withdrew, his slippers padding on the marble. Once he was gone Imladrik sat at the end of the bed. As he did so his whole body seemed to sag.

‘Why, son?’ he asked.

Thoriol had dreaded the question ever since he had awoken on that first morning, out at sea with his head hammering. It was all so random, all so unplanned. Not for the first time, he had no good answers.

‘I was deceived, at the start,’ he said, opting to be as truthful as he could. ‘Then I thought I’d been given another chance. Where is the rest of my company?’

‘I do not know. I can ask Caradryel to bring them to-’

‘No!’ Thoriol exhaled with irritation. ‘No, they will not want that. Do you not understand?’

‘No, I do not understand.’

‘It would terrify them.’ Thoriol didn’t want to explain. ‘They were all running away, for one reason or another. I will find them myself.’

Imladrik looked at him with concern. It was an expression Thoriol recognised very well — the look of strained worry, of doubt, one that said are you sure that is wise?

‘You are not one of them,’ Imladrik warned. ‘You are a prince. It could not have lasted.’

‘You do not know them.’

‘Of course not. Do you think I know a fraction of those who serve under me?’

Thoriol struggled to control his irritation. ‘They were good soldiers.’

‘No doubt, but you are better than them.’

‘Why? Because I am Tor Caled?’

‘Yes.’ Imladrik’s voice was soft but his expression was unbending. ‘We do not choose our path, son. You may think you can deny your bloodline and take up a longbow, forgetting every privilege you have had, but believe me the gods will punish you for it. You were born to higher things.’

Thoriol laughed sourly. ‘You saw what happened in the Dragonspine.’

‘You failed. Once. Do you think that every rider succeeds on his first attempt? Don’t be weak. You are throwing everything away.’

That stung. ‘Do you know how many dwarfs I killed on the walls? I was of service. For the first time in my life, I did something worthy.’

‘I have ten thousand archers,’ said Imladrik, still struggling to comprehend. ‘I have one son.’

‘Yes, you do, so let me choose this.’

‘Did you not hear me? Choice is for lovesick swains. There is no choice; there is duty.’

Thoriol felt like screaming. All his life it had been the same, the relentless pressure to fulfil the potential of his ancestors.

‘It is not as if I wish to remain idle,’ he protested. ‘I can fight! I will fight.’

‘You placed yourself in danger.’

‘But the dragons are dangerous. Magic is dangerous.’

‘You do not belong there.’

‘I do not-’

‘I will not lose you!’ Imladrik shouted, losing control for just a moment before reeling it in again. He clenched his fists, balling them into the coverlet.

Thoriol said nothing, stunned. His father rarely raised his voice; he rarely needed to.

Imladrik took a deep breath. Fatigue hung heavily under his eyes in black rings.

‘You are the destiny of the House,’ he said, quietly, recovering himself. ‘My brother is a fool and a warmonger — he has no issue and will not live out the storm he has set in motion. Only you will remain, Thoriol. Only you.’

That was hard to hear. It had always been hard to hear. He had never wanted any part of it, though even to think such a thing seemed churlish in the light of the sacrifices that had been made.

That had ever been his curse, ill-fitted for the life the gods had ordained for him. His father would never understand, being so consumed by the path he had taken, so entranced and absorbed in the dragons that gave him his power and his reputation.

Before he could reply, though, Imladrik rose, pushing himself heavily from the bunk as if he carried the weight of the Annulii on his shoulders.

‘You need rest.’ He looked shaky on his feet. ‘Gods, I need rest. I should not have raised my voice. But promise me this: stay here. Do not seek them out. We will talk again and find some way to make sense of all of this.’

Thoriol watched him, wondering if anything he had said, now or at any other time, had ever made much of an impression on his father. Perhaps he should have tried dragonsong.

Imladrik extended a hand awkwardly, then let it drop. ‘I am glad you are recovering. For a moment, during the siege…’ A wintry smile flickered. ‘We will talk again.’

Thoriol nodded weakly, knowing that they would and yet doubting that anything much would be said.

‘So we will,’ he replied, his voice unenthusiastic.