The Widow's House

Marcus

Marcus had spent years of his life bent over maps, planning his battles and campaigns. He’d looked down on mountains made from ink and rivers drawn in dust. Once, he’d even walked through one of the fairly idiotic miniature rooms where the full landscape had been recreated in tiny scale so that the generals and kings could play at striding across their territories like gods. The actual world seen from above was an utterly different thing. From his place strapped to the dragon’s leg, the land curved and curled in surprising and gentle ways. A hill could begin as an irregularity of the horizon, swell as if it were reaching up toward them, and fall away. Forests became a single, uniform texture of spring green. When they passed above farmland, he could tell the crooked furrows from the true. Vast herds of elk, surprised by this unfamiliar greatness in the sky, scattered before them like he’d poured blotting sand on a bare page and blown it.

Inys’s flesh was warm beneath the scales almost to the point of discomfort. The leather-and-wood slings that held them all in place creaked and groaned, and Marcus couldn’t help imagining one giving way. The long, slow fall and sudden stop. The wind of their passage roared around them and made all conversation impossible, but when he craned his head to look, he saw Sandr’s eyes squeezed closed, Cary’s open and her hair flowing back like a child’s icon of defiance. The great dragon himself was reduced to the scaled archway of his forelegs, a long, sinuous neck, and the lower jaw seen from below and ending in a sharp chin. From time to time, it screamed out a bloom of fire that stank and choked them as they flew through its dying smoke.

When they had first left the ground behind, Marcus had imagined that they would streak across Antea, rise over the mountains that divided the Free Cities from Birancour and Northcoast, and arrive in Porte Oliva in a matter of hours. The power of Inys’s wings seemed unlimited. In practice, they had gone faster than the swiftest courier, but it was still the better part of a week before the snow-topped mountains appeared on the horizon, growing slowly and inexorably larger.

The endurance of the passengers had proved to be the limiting factor.

When Inys landed, claws sinking into the deep snow, Mikel was the first to free himself from the sling. He staggered forward two steps in the thigh-deep powder and collapsed. “It’s all right,” he called weakly. “Just leave me here. I’ll be fine.”

The snowfield was near the crest of one of the highest of the peaks. The glacier spread out around them, white as the moon and blue as the sky. A great cliff stood to the north, its stone face barely visible under the layers of permanent frost. Marcus released himself and then Cary and Kit. The cold bit at him, and he couldn’t catch his breath. The air felt too thin to breathe. At the dragon’s side, Hornet was retching loudly. Marcus made a loose snowball and went back to the sick man. Hornet took the ball with a nod and sucked on it miserably until he’d regained himself a bit.

Freed of his burden, Inys paced through the snow, his head shifting back and forth, fire gouting between his teeth. Kit stumbled forward. There had been ice forming in his hair even before they’d landed. His face was pale where it wasn’t windburned and he was as breathless as Marcus.

“Captain. I’m concerned that our friend here may have…” Kit paused, bending over with his elbows resting on his knees. After half a dozen panting breaths, he went on. “… may have overestimated our reserves.”

Marcus nodded. At the cliff wall, Inys had risen up on his hind legs and was clawing at the frost, knocking down sheets of it thicker than the length of Marcus’s outstretched arm. A cloud of ice crystals rose halfway up the cliff glittering silver and white in the too-bright sun.

“I’ll mention that,” Marcus said, took a long moment, and started the trudge over to the dragon’s side. His head ached badly, and for all the water trapped in the snow and ice, the air was so dry he could feel his eyes going gritty and his mouth thick and cottoned. He scooped up a bit of snow and stuffed it in his mouth. The melt tasted oddly metallic and also wonderful.

“Excuse me,” he said when he reached Inys’s feet. “Might need a word. With you. This landing? Don’t think it’ll sustain life.”

The dragon looked down. Its shrugs were unlike anything human, but still instantly recognizable.

“Your blood takes too long to thicken. If I let you stay lower, you would not grow accustomed to the heights.”

“As it may,” Marcus said, “we’re a bit thin of food. Or shelter. And I’d prefer not to die of cold.”

Inys stepped away to the east, its claws moving along the newly exposed stone face of the cliff. Behind them, Sandr was crying openly. It was an exhausted sound, empty of all emotion but fatigue. “You are weak. Untrained. Slaves such as you should be able to live a day and a night together and stand ready to do battle at the journey’s end.”

“Fallen world that way,” Marcus said, the roughness of anger warming his voice. “But since we’re what you’ve got to work with, you might at least consider taking better care of your fucking tools.”

Inys’s head flickered toward him. The eyes were filled with gold and darkness. Marcus’s fast-beating heart picked up its pace and he felt a sudden lightheadedness. The dragon’s chuckle seemed as violent as a landslide.

“You are ill, feral, and untrained, Marcus Wester. But you are a strong line. In better days, you would have led a thousand slaves of your own.”

“Not sure whether that’s flattering,” Marcus said, but Inys ignored the words, his attention already turned back to the cliff wall.

“So long as my tools serve me, I shall keep them clean and sharp,” the dragon said. Its claws caught on some near-invisible flaw or seam in the stone, and the dragon let out a hiss that sounded like pleasure. “Here. If time has not broken the mechanisms…”

A creaking sound rose from the mountain below them, like the hinges of the world badly in need of grease. The stone cliff face slid gracefully back, one layer and then another and then another, each perfectly symmetrical. And then with a sound like a wall falling, they moved aside, and a vast hallway glowed gold and green before them. Inys shook his wings, snow and ice falling from them onto Marcus’s head and shoulders, and stepped forward. Marcus followed, gaping like a dirt-farm child dropped into a king’s temple.

The hall rose in seven great tiers with pillars of dragon’s jade marbled with gold holding them. Light that seemed to have no source filled the space, and the smell of plum blossoms sweetened the thin air. Huge stone statues, twice the size of any living person, showed each of the thirteen races bowed down before what seemed at first a great stone log: Firstblood, Jasuru, Cinnae, Kurtadam. Even the rare races of Haunadam and Raushadam. And the Drowned. Inys’s hind claws locked around it, and the dragon hauled itself up. A perch. No one in thousands of years had seen a dragon upon its perch until now, and Marcus had to fight the urge—deep as instinct—to kneel. There were no fires and no smoke, but the bitter cold seemed to stop at the hall’s entrance as if it knew it was not welcome. The flakes of snow and chips of frost and ice that fell into the place or that were tracked in by the actors’ boots and cloaks melted at once and were wicked away by a web of nearly invisible grooves that laced the floor. The dragon tilted its head.

“Will this be enough of a tent for you?” it asked in a low, purring voice that rattled Marcus’s spine a little.

“Ah.… Sure.”

“I am pleased for you, little slave,” Inys said. “I would have been sorry to disappoint.”

“What is this place?” Smit asked, his voice soft with awe.

“When the press of the court was too great, I would come here,” Inys said. “I would… sulk. The slaves I put here would sing to me, and I would pose questions to them to pass the days. I was the only one who came here. Except for Erex.”

The dragon’s gaze softened and turned inward. As Marcus watched, grief twisted the great snout and it closed its eyes, shying to the side as if steeling itself for a blow. Marcus felt a sudden sympathy for the beast. It was disorienting to see the pain he recognized so clearly translated onto such an unlikely flesh. Inys’s head drooped.

“We’ll rest here tonight, then,” Marcus said. “Leave again in the morning. It won’t take us many more days to reach Porte Oliva.”

“And what will we do there that can matter?” Inys asked, but it was clear no answer was expected. The dragon unfurled its wings, and the tips touched the walls. With a shriek, Inys leaped from the perch, launching the great body into the sky. Marcus walked to the edge of the hall, looking out over the glacier to the white-and-grey peaks of the mountains. The cold radiated, chilling his skin without biting it. Whatever dragon’s craft had held the weather at bay these last few thousand years still held it. The dragon flapped its wings, growing smaller. Unburdened, it flew faster. In less than a hundred breaths, Inys was no more than a spot of darkness in the vast landscape. And then distance took the dragon and left Marcus alone with the players.

The others walked through the hall and the chambers beyond it speaking in hushed voices. Charlit Soon cried out in delight, and Sandr rushed across the space to see what she’d found. Marcus stayed where he was. Before long Cary and Kit joined him. The sun hovered over the peaks to the west. No birds flew so high as they were now. No trees grew.

“How long would you imagine it’s been,” Marcus said, “since someone stood in this place, looking out?”

Neither of them answered. They didn’t have to.

“Did it go to get food, Marcus?” Cary asked.

“I think so.”

“So it’ll come back, then,” she said.

“Probably.”

“If it doesn’t,” Kit said gently. “Or should our friend become distracted by grief…”

Marcus looked out over the vast, trackless glacier. “Well, that would make for an interesting problem.”

“I suppose we’ll hope it doesn’t come to that,” Kit said.

“That was my plan.”

Cary called Mikel over, and together they started looking for something to gather ice and snow in, melting it for drinking water. Marcus turned back, walking to the statues bent down to make their obeisance to the empty perch. The metal from which they were cast was unlike any he had seen before. The workmanship was beautiful. Had the artists chosen to make their subject lifelike, Marcus would have thought perhaps some dragon’s magic had brought real men and women low, transforming them into art, but these were stylized just slightly. The fur of the Kurtadam made soft spirals. The Jasuru’s bent head snarled at the ground, baring its pointed teeth. The Tralgu, its large ears laid back against its head, held a fist against its chest as if pressing its heart, but when Marcus looked closely, the thumb and fingers were folded together in a gesture that would have gotten Yardem into a brawl in any taproom of the Keshet.

Marcus leaned against the massive statues, imagining some human sculptor more generations ago than he could count shaping the molds from which these were cast and adding in the snarl of the Jasuru. The Tralgu’s rude gesture. From even his brief acquaintance with dragons, Marcus felt sure the punishment for being disrespectful to Inys and his kin would have been death, and likely an unpleasant one. Someone had thought it worth the risk.

Smit and Hornet had made their way through some back chambers to the sixth tier and were waving down to Sandr and Charlit Soon. Their laughter was giddy and bright, fueled as much by the terror of their situation as delight. Marcus shifted the poisoned sword against his back. The shoulder it had rested against ached like he’d wrenched it.

“Kit,” he called, waving the old actor toward him. “Does anything strike you about our friend?”

“It seems to me that he’s in great pain.”

“Other than that.”

“I would say he is likely to be our best ally against my former companions.”

“I was thinking more along the lines of his towering contempt toward us and the way we all seemed inclined to accept it.”

“Well, yes. I suppose there is that.”

“There was a mercenary captain I used to know. Arren Bassilain. Ever heard of him?”

“I can’t say that I have.”

Marcus leaned against the massive Tralgu, hitching himself up to rest on the statue’s broad shoulders. “He had a trick. Before the campaign, he’d stop at every taproom along the way and make a thing of himself. Boast, tell tales. Spill all this hairwash about the glories of battle and how it made boys into men. Talked about how the women in a fallen city would throw themselves at the conquering army. That no man in his force ever slept alone after a battle.”

Kit chuckled ruefully. Above them, Hornet and Smit were waving a brush as long as a man at the end of a long, thin pole. Marcus could imagine Inys at his perch being groomed by his slaves.

“The thing is,” he went on, “Arren was a hell of a talker. By the time he reached wherever we were supposed to be fighting, he’d have taken on a couple dozen boys greener than grass and convinced they were about to have all their dreams delivered to them on a plate. Whenever the first battle came, he’d send them out first to soak up some arrows and get an idea of what the enemy’s position was so that when he sent his real forces, he had that little bit more information.”

“It seems a cynical and cruel thing to do,” Kit said.

“My trade doesn’t attract the best people. The thing is, not all of them died, and the ones that lived, some of them stayed in his troop. More and more over time. He didn’t think anything of it, and I didn’t either. And then one day a group of his men got together and traded stories about how he’d recruited them, got angry over it, and opened his throat for him.”

“I see,” Kit said, his gaze shifting around the hall. “Do you think something similar may have happened to the dragons of old?”

“I think war’s like fire. It goes where it wants more often than where you’d have wanted it to,” Marcus said. “We know for a certainty that the dragons fell and that the spiders fled. If you count the victor as who was standing on the field at the end, that wasn’t either of them.”

“Kit! Cary!” Sandr said, pulling Charlit Soon along behind him by the sleeve. “Charlit’s got the best idea ever. We’ve got to do this!”

Marcus and Kit exchanged a look and stepped forward. At the base of the great perch, Charlit was smiling, her eyes bright and a little glassy. Her cheeks were red with wind burn, the same as all of them. Cary crossed her arms and nodded to her.

“I was just thinking that, with the cart gone, we’d be practicing the things we can play from the ground,” Charlit Soon said. “And it struck me that Inys has never seen any of them. He’s probably never even heard of PennyPenny or Orcus the Demon King or any of them.”

“It would be like performing for the greatest king in the history of the world!” Sandr said. “We could do The Prisoner’s Gate. Or Allaren Mankiller—”

“We can’t do Mankiller without the props,” Cary said. “But maybe PennyPenny and the Three Wives of Stollbourne?”

“Kit could be the third wife!” Charlit Soon said, laughter bubbling out of with the words.

Kit’s smile was warm and gentle. “I suppose I could at that,” he said.

“What’re you talking about down there?” Hornet called from the upper tier. “Are you making jokes about us?”

“No,” Sandr called. “We’re going to put on a performance. Get down here and help, you lazy bastard!”

Marcus stepped away from the gabble and excitement, back to the edge of the hall. The sun had set now, and the mountains seemed crafted from distance and mist and the deepening gray-blue of night. The snowfield glowed. The players’ voices rose and fell behind him, giddy and pleased and happy because they were a people who traded in that. He traded in violence, and had his whole life. He didn’t see that changing now.

Far off and low between two peaks, something glowed for a moment. Smaller than a spark, but red amid the blue-lit world. A brief flame, here, and then gone. Marcus squinted. His eyes hurt from the dryness and his head still ached. In the growing gloom, it was hard to be sure that the little flame had been dragonfire, but before long, there was a little knot of moving darkness in the direction the spark had been. And then, barely visible, the great wings, and then Inys rose up from the night, the corpse of a ram in his hind claw. Marcus stepped back as the dragon landed, dropping its kill onto the floor. The thin grooves that had wicked away the snowmelt were just as effective with blood.

“I can dress that for you if you’d like,” Marcus said, nodding toward the dead animal.

“I have eaten all I care to,” the dragon said, its voice half exhaustion and half disdain. “This is to take care of my tools.”

“Inys! Inys!” Charlit Soon called from the perch. “Come see what we’ve made for you!”

The dragon lumbered away toward the perch, leaving bloody claw marks behind. Marcus drew a work knife from his belt and took the dead ram by its horns while the players arrayed themselves inside and Cary began declaiming. The dragon watched with an amused expression, licking the blood from its talons.

“You know, little sheep,” Marcus said, as he prepared to skin and clean it. “I really don’t see how this ends well.”