When Dragons Rage

21

Will snarled and cursed as he kicked his way through brown slush. He didn’t care if it splashed up on him—his anger insulated him from the cold. As for the state it left his clothes in, he didn’t care about that, either. The clothes, titles, all that stuff was stupid and he hated it.

He spun around and looked back at the palace. The tops of the towers already hid beneath fluffy white blankets of falling snow. It looked very peaceful, which was ridiculous given who was in there at the moment. And the guards, all of them, should have been rushing to the palace to kill the sullanciri. That much seemed blatantly obvious to Will, but everyone else seemed to think a flag of truce meant something.

It means you’re missing a chance to kill Nefrai-kesh, that’s what it means.

Growing up in the Dimandowns wasn’t easy, but at least he’d learned some hard lessons. The slums of Yslin were a place where truces lasted for as long as it took someone to get more people on his side. If Nefrai-kesh had shown up there the way he showed up in Meredo, he’d have been ripped apart. And, given what he was, even if they hadn’t killed him, they certainly wouldn’t have believed anything he had to say.

Will turned his back on the palace and continued trudging through the snow. The way nobility acted never ceased to surprise him. On one hand you had folks like King Augustus, who were good and noble most of the time, but who admitted they didn’t act well toward a friend. On the other hand you had Scrainwood, for whom Will actually would take a bucket of warm piss in exchange. And in between you had folks who could be greedy and grubby, or who would tell you whatever they thought you wanted to hear, or just had folks who had no idea what life was like in the world of the streets. They all seemed stupid.

He frowned because he didn’t want to classify Princess Alexia as a noble in that regard. She really was different, but even she hadn’t done anything about Nefrai-kesh. He did allow as how she didn’t have a magick sword with her to kill him—Resolute had one, but he wasn’t there. And Crow’s sword, Tsamoc, now resided in the princess’ room, where it was no help. Still and all, he was pretty sure she had to have seen the stupidity of leaving Nefrai-kesh alive.

A shiver ran down his spine. He really had been ready to shove his little dagger into the thing that had been his grandfather, but that hadn’t scared the sullanciri. He’d just opened his arms and said that Will could come to him. Nefrai-kesh had said that Will would be his heir.

“I don’t want to be your heir.” Will snarled loudly and stamped his feet. “It’s because of you I’m in this mess!”

The absurdity of his complaint struck Will and made him laugh for a moment. He looked up, seeing if anyone else thought things were as silly as he did; but what he saw surprised him because most folks were completely ignoring him. They just paid him no mind, and that astonished him because even walking to the palace to attend the trial he had constantly been subjected to profuse wishes of good will by folks he didn’t even know.

But now, now everyone treats me as if I don’t exist! He wondered at that for a moment, then his jaw dropped open. Of course, the mask! The mask he’d left lying in the court had been the thing people recognized. Oriosans could read masks as easily as Will could calculate the worth of a purse by how it bulged. He might be Will Norrington, but Lord Norrington wore a specific mask and without it he was nothing.

He mulled over the irony that meant not wearing a disguise made him invisible, but realized it was just a reversal of the sort of misdirection he and his companions had used when cutting purses in Yslin. Working a crowd, he’d find a target. At a signal two of his confederates would start a fight, jostling people, including the target. As they bumped into him, Will would clip his purse and slip away quietly. All the attention had been drawn to the fighting kids and since no one was watching him, he got away cleanly.

Here the lack of a mask meant that you were beneath notice or, if not that, certainly below the interest of those who could wear masks. Will knew enough of history to know that Muroso, Alosa, and Oriosa had, at one time, been provinces that rebelled against an empire. The rebels had worn masks to disguise themselves as they fought against the empire, and when they won independence, those who had fought for it became the new nobility. To them and their descendants went the right to wear a mask, and the decorations on their masks marked their importance.

Because of the masks, the Oriosans constantly seemed to be looking for symbols and significance in things. Will was certain that tugging off his mask and throwing it on the floor would be seen as having all sorts of portents and meaning, while he’d just done it because he wanted to throw something and wasn’t going to throw the dagger, which he liked.

He shook his head, imagining them thinking it was a rejection of his citizenship. Since the masks of the dead were often kept by the family, tossing it toward Nefrai-kesh could be taken as a sign that he was saying that the sullanciri should just consider him dead. Or it could be taken as a gesture of his rejecting the niceties of the court and vowing to wage his own war against Chytrine.

There were many more things, and he assumed that gossip mills would be grinding away long hours making them up. He didn’t like the idea that some folks would think he was walking away from the war with Chytrine. That would probably be the darkest of the omens read in what he had done. There had to be a way to put that to rights, but exactly how to do it, he wasn’t certain.

More symbols, and the Oriosans will believe in me again. They all do things with reasons, and as long as I have a good one, they’ll believe me. Will sighed. He knew he’d have to figure things out. He’d have liked to talk to Kerrigan about it, since the mage’s perspective on things was even weirder than that of the average Oriosan. Kerrigan, however, had gone missing, and Lombo was out hunting him. The Vilwanese consulate had reported back to Princess Alexia that they didn’t know where he was, and their courier sounded nervous enough that Will believed the Vilwanese didn’t have him.

The idea that Oriosans always do something for a reason began to bounce around inside Will’s skull. He started to wonder what purpose Nefrai-kesh would have for showing up at the trial. Sure, his appearance in the palace was likely to scare a lot of folks—Scrainwood first among them. But a better way to scare a lot of folks would have been for the sullanciri just to kill Scrainwood. Having Linchmere on the throne would have terrified everyone in Oriosa and well beyond its borders.

The sullanciri couldn’t actually have intended to come to give testimony. That made no sense whatsoever. Crow’s fate really didn’t matter, and if Chytrine wanted Crow dead, she could have sent the sullanciri into his cell. Making folks use the laws of a nation to kill an innocent man might strike some nobles as a horrible thing, but Will was fresh from war and knew that anything Scrainwood might have done to Crow would be, odds on, more pleasant than the sort of death found on a battlefield.

By the gods—/ should have seen it immediately! Will began to run through the streets, dodging carts, slipping in muddy slush, going down, splashing, getting up again, and continuing as fast as he could. He leaped over snowdrifts, ducked, and twisted through the middle of a snowball war and shoved slower people aside. Ignoring the cries of the few who went down, he sped on, ever faster, toward the Rampant Panther.

There was only one reason that Nefrai-kesh would risk showing up at the trial, and that was misdirection. If there was going to be any alarm sent up, it would summon all of the guards to the palace. And the false flag of truce makes folks believe he means no harm, but I don’t believe that at all. Putting Nefrai-kesh in the palace was a risk, but Chytrine would only undertake that risk for a greater gain, and there was only one thing in Meredo that she wanted that badly.

The ruby fragment of the DragonCrown!

Will burst through the inn’s door and bolted immediately for the stairs to the rooms. He held his left hand up beside his face, half in a wave, but mostly to hide the fact that he had no mask on. He hit the landing and doubled back to the second floor, then dashed along the corridor toward the last room on the right.

Time slowed for Will despite his haste. He studied the floor at that end of the corridor, for Kerrigan’s room was right across the hall from his own. Before leaving that morning he’d checked Kerrigan’s room and had placed a thread between the door and the jamb that would fall out if the door had been opened. More important, Will had used lampblack to darken a couple of knots in the wooden flooring. Had a boot brushed over them, the scuff marks would have showed clearly. Will had avoided them himself, and Resolute had been warned, so only a thief would run afoul of it.

Or Kerrigan, which would be a big help.

As he neared the door he picked the dark thread out against the blond wood. That allowed him a touch of relief, then he slowed and dropped to one knee to survey the knots. Two remained black as puddles of ink, but the third had changed. No streaks, as if anyone had stepped on it, but it had a big flat splash of grey in it.

Dust.

Will looked up at the short rafter running across the width of the corridor. The dust up there had to be thicker than the snow in the streets, and it was possible a cat had wandered along that beam, but Will wasn’t of a mind to be considering cats when a thief might be about. Glancing at the wall above the door, he saw a couple of faint marks, the origin of which he couldn’t imagine, but he knew they’d not been there earlier. Which meant someone was stealing his DragonCrown fragment.

Drawing his dagger, Will stepped to the door and opened it. The oil lamp behind him stabbed a wedge of yellow light into the tiny room that had housed Kerrigan. The thief’s line of sight was drawn upward, to the rafter’s continuation in the room, and the figure hunched and huddled in the lurid scarlet glow. What he saw sent two emotions through him, the first quickly being subsumed by the second.

The first emotion was pure elation as he saw that the trap he and Kerrigan had set had functioned far better than he could have hoped. To hide the DragonCrown fragment they searched the room and in that rafter found a rot-hollow right where the beam had been reinforced by two other pieces of lumber. Kerrigan had used magic to strengthen the beam, melding those two sections of wood into the original. At the same time he reshaped the hollow to fit the DragonCrown fragment snugly inside. At Will’s suggestion Kerrigan narrowed the hole a thief would reach through, so it would be too small to let him slip a hand back out when he had the gem in it.

Kerrigan had enhanced this situation further by casting another spell on the fragment that would make it as sticky as a spider’s web, guaranteeing that any thief who wanted to get away would have to leave his hand behind.

Worked like a charm.

The second emotion completely smothered his elation at success. Pure fear poured into Will as he saw what they’d caught. The creature had the bulk of a large dog or a small bear, and its body bristled with four-inch-long hairs on its bare body and head and legs, with a thick down covering its back. Its i shoulders were hunched as it tugged mightily to free its right hand, with its i legs bunched and pushing.

All eight of the legs!

With a moment’s retrospect Will realized he should have recognized the thing as a spider, for the body came in segments and the four pairs of legs from the middle looked like spider’s legs. The fact that the creature was huge beyond all imagining could have fooled him, but it wasn’t the deciding factor.

Aside from being blue, save for the bristles of black hair, what forced away the judgment was the human torso that rose from the creature’s middle. While the chest was smaller than it should have been for the arms and head, and while blue down did carpet that section of the body, it was unmistakably human.

Then the creature turned and looked at him with bubbled eyes and wickedly curved mandibles. The mouth parts worked and Will heard something that almost clicked and growled its way into a semblance of human speech. An angry hiss capped the remark and the creature gave another hard tug on the fragment.

“You’re caught now, thief!”

Will brought the dagger up to his ear and whipped it forward. Though entirely unbalanced for throwing, the dagger sped to its target. The hilt smashed the creature in the middle of the back, wrenched a clicked howl from its throat, then bounced back down onto Kerrigan’s bed.

Sprinting into the room, Will dove and grabbed for the dagger. As his right hand closed on the hilt, something grabbed his jacket right between his shoulder blades. Will twisted around to slash at whatever had him, and discovered the thing had shifted to the bottom of the rafter and had grabbed him with its left hand. Will cut at the arm, drawing blood, but failed to win his release.

The spider-thing hauled Will up and smashed his head against the rafter. Stars exploded, and Will must have blacked out for a moment, because when the world swam back into focus, he found his legs wrapped in webbing and the left arm holding him by the front of his jacket. Black blood oozed from the wound and began to soak into his clothing. It had an acrid scent akin to burning nutmeats.

The creature thrust its face to his and snarled. That close to it, Will caught some hint of familiarity that told him who his captor was. The realization shook him. The Azure Spider!

The young thief’s mouth dropped open. “You are the Azure Spider. You’re one of her things now.”

The sullanciri hissed, then jerked its head to the trapped hand.

Will shook his head. “Not even if I knew how to undo it.” He breathed in through his nose, then spat a huge gobbet of spittle, hitting the creature in the left eye cluster.

The mandibles parted, the sullanciri’s head dipped, and pure fire pierced Will’s neck right and left. His body shook as molten agony poured into him. He tried to scream, but found his throat paralyzed. Then the pressure vanished and he felt himself falling. It seemed to take forever. He watched the sullancirfs left hand get smaller, watched a droplet of that black blood chase him down, and he hoped, somehow, that Kerrigan’s bed was still beneath him.

Then the world began to shift. First Will thought his hearing was going bad because while he caught sounds that had the cadence of speech, they made no sense to him. The spider-thing tried to shift to the left, hissing loudly, but since the spittle had half-blinded it and its hand was still trapped, its range of motion was limited.

Then a needle, silver-grey, stabbed up through the sullanciri. It drove through the center of the legs, emerged, then spitted the manspine. The creature shook once, hard, then the legs released and curled in. The body started to fall, then hung there by one hand as it went limp save for the rhythmic, pumping contractions of the abdomen.

“Will. Will!” Resolute’s face appeared above his. The thief couldn’t see well enough to read any concern in the Vorquelf’s expression, but it came through in the voice. “Will, are you with me, boy?”

Will nodded, or thought he did. Fire burned through his veins and his body bowed as muscles contracted. He tried to open his mouth and speak, but before he could do that, another convulsion hit him and the world dissolved into nothingness.