Blood of Dragons (34 page)

Malta gleamed in the yellow light of the torches and lanterns, and with a strange thrill, Thymara recognized the Queen of the Elderlings. No wonder all of Jamaillia had seen her so, commanding with words as compelling as the glamour of the dragon. Thymara was suddenly certain that if Tintaglia could feel Malta's words, she would take heart from them.

‘We fly!' Rapskal roared in response. His voice had gone husky and wild. His eyes glared with fury and the set of his mouth made him a stranger to Thymara. He paced among the churning Elderlings and dragons, seeming suddenly taller. ‘My armour! My spear!' he cried aloud. ‘Where are my servants? Send them for my armour. We must fly tonight. We cannot wait for light, for by then she may have gone into eternal darkness. Rise up and seize your arms. Ready the dragon baskets! Bring forth the battle harness!'

Thymara stared at him, open-mouthed. She felt caught alone in a vortex of whirling times. Tellator. Tellator spoke in that tone of command, Tellator strode like that. All around her, dragons were rearing and trumpeting furiously. Keepers darted among them, some imploring their dragons to stay safely here, to not try to fly in darkness, while some of the keepers had moved clear of a horde of dragons shaking out their wings and snapping their necks to fill their poison glands. Rapskal's peculiar behaviour seemed to have gone unnoticed.

He strode toward her, a clenched-teeth smile on his face. She froze as he took her in his arms and held her to his heart. ‘Have no fear, my darling. A hundred times have I gone into battle, and always I have returned to you, have I not? This time will be no exception! Have faith in me, Amarinda. I will safely return to you, both honour and life intact. We will turn back any that dare to enter our territory uninvited!'

‘Rapskal!' She shouted his name and broke free of his embrace. Seizing him by the shoulders, she shook him as hard as she could. ‘You are Rapskal and I am Thymara. And you are not a warrior!'

He stared at her oddly as he drew himself up taller. ‘Maybe not, Thymara, but someone must fight, and I am the only one who has a dragon willing to carry me. I have to go. Those cruel murderers have attacked a queen dragon, seeking to butcher her like a cow! It cannot be tolerated.'

The voice was Rapskal's and the very earnest stare was his too, but the cadence of his voice and the words he used were Tellator's. She tried again. ‘Rapskal, you are not him. And I am not Amarinda. I am Thymara.'

His eyes seemed to focus on her again. ‘Of course you are, Thymara. And I know who I am. But I also bear Tellator's memories. The price of his memories is a small one, and that is to honour the life of the man who gave them to me. To continue his duties and work.' He leaned closer to her and peered into her eyes as if looking for something. ‘As you should honour Amarinda's memories by continuing her tasks. Someone must, Thymara, and that someone is you.'

She looked at him and shook her head. She became dimly aware of Tats standing beside them, watching them both intently. She could take no time for him now, regardless of what he thought. She held tight to Rapskal and spoke earnestly. ‘Rapskal, I don't want you to be Tellator. I don't want to be Amarinda. I want us to be us, and whatever we do, I want it to be our own decision, not some continuation of someone else's life.'

He gave a small sigh and shifted his gaze to Tats. ‘Watch over her, my friend. And if I do not return, think well of me.' His eyes met Thymara's again. ‘Some day, you will understand. And sooner, I think, would be better than later. For the sake of my honour and my word. Heeby! Heeby, to me!'

He turned away from her. Some other woman from another time exclaimed, ‘Your sword! Your armour!' She very nearly ran after him.

But Tats was at her side, holding firmly to her arm. He spoke by her ear in the milling chaos of dragons and keepers. ‘He has neither, and never has had them. Thymara. Come back to me. You cannot stop him. You know that.'

‘I know.' She wondered if Tats spoke of Rapskal charging off to fight a battle weaponless, or of his assumption of another man's life and duties. She looked at the man beside her. Tears welled painfully in her eyes. ‘We're losing him. We're losing our friend.'

‘I fear you may be right.' He pulled her into his arms, held her head against his chest to shield her as all around them, dragons trumpeted and then leapt from the ground to take flight. The wind of their beating wings battered them and their war cries buffeted her ears. In moments, they were high above them.

Thymara lifted her eyes to watch them go, but the overcast sky had swallowed them all, and only rain fell on her uplifted face.

Day the 6th of the Plough Moon

Year the 7th of the Independent Alliance of Traders

From Kim, Keeper of the Birds, Cassarick

To Trader Finbok of the Bingtown Traders, Bingtown

Dear Trader Finbok,

I am in possession of a message from you which, I must admit, confuses me greatly. Either you have sent this message to me in error and are unaware of the great damage such a missive could do to my reputation, or you are a villain and a scoundrel who deliberately seeks to disgrace me. Perhaps you are deceived by some evil person who has slandered my name by pretending to be me. I choose to hope that you are not truly the malicious sort of person who would risk both our reputations.

The letter I received not only claims that I have been sending you information stolen from other Traders' messages but also shows that you have been paying me a great deal of money for such information. And it declares that unless I surrender certain information about your son, of whom I assure you I have never heard, you will betray me to the Guild Masters in Bingtown!

I am astonished and shocked to receive such a letter. It has occurred to me that perhaps it is actually from an enemy of yours who seeks to cause you financial and social disaster! For surely, if I took this to the Guild Masters, protesting my innocence, they would present it to the Bingtown Traders' Council, and leave it to them to determine if you have been a party to the theft of secrets of other Traders and profited by such knowledge.

Please immediately reply to this missive so that we may clear up this whole matter.

‘Dead things float.'

The Chalcedean spoke the words firmly, as if ordering someone or something to comply with them. The weary men gathered on the deck shuffled their feet, but no one replied. It was all too obvious to them that perhaps dead dragons did not float. In last night's uproarious battle, they had slain the blue monster and seen her sink beneath the water. Many of the men had cried out in dismay as the lifeless hulk had sunk. The others had counselled them to wait, she would rise.

The sun had passed its zenith. No carcass had bobbed to the surface yet. No one had slept. All hands had kept watch on the water, fearing at first that the dragon was not dead and might venture another attack. Then, as the night wore on and she did not rise, they watched, fearing that their long-sought prize, the foundation of all their dreams, was on the bottom of the river, for ever out of their reach.

They had probed the area between the moored ships with their longest poles and felt only water or river bottom. One hapless oar-slave, secured by a rope about his ankle, had been thrown overboard and commanded to dive as deep as he could and see what he might see. He had not wished to go; he had cried out in protest as his fellows had obediently lifted him and then flung him over the side. No swimmer he; he had sunk, and risen to the surface to splash and beg for help. The shouted commands for him to dive and look for the dragon carcass had not, in Hest's opinion, moved him.

Rather, his own ineptitude had sunk him again. The second time, they had dragged him from the water by the line about his ankle. He had lain on the deck like a dead thing, his skin kissed red by the river, puffing air into his lungs, his eyes filmed with grey from the acid water. They shouted at him, demanding to know what he had seen. ‘Nothing! I saw nothing, I see nothing!' The man's terror at being blind had robbed him of his fear of his master.

The Chalcedean had kicked him disdainfully, proclaimed him useless and would have discarded him over the side if one of the others had not insisted that a blind man on an oar was better than an empty bench. Hest had noted that none of the Chalcedeans had volunteered to dive overboard.

Now as the rising sun granted them enough light that they could see under the trees, they scanned the nearby banks to see if the dragon's carcass had washed ashore. There was nothing. Then the Chalcedean had announced that perhaps the current had carried their prize downstream. His haggard men stared at him with sick doubt in their eyes. The dragon was gone and they knew it.

Their leader did not share their gloom. ‘Oh, come!' Lord Dargen cajoled them. ‘Will you rest now and let our fortune slip away from us? The current has carried our prize downstream. We will seek her there, and know that every stroke of the oar carries us closer to home as well as closer to a golden future!'

It sounded like chicanery to Hest, a mother's lie to make a child open his mouth for the bitter medicine. But the crews accepted it and began to make ready for a day's travel. What choice did they have? Odd, how living as a slave was showing him how little choice most men had in their lives. His existence had always been shaped by his father's authority. Last night, when his stolen rags and chill hold had begun to seem like a cosy refuge from standing on the deck holding a lantern aloft for the searchers, he had reconsidered Sedric's fantasy of the two of them running off to a distant country. Sedric had voiced it only once, toward the end of their time together in Bingtown. Hest had scoffed at it back then and forbidden him to speak again of his idiotic dream.

Hest had recalled the quarrel in detail as he had stood on the darkened deck, spending hours of his life functioning as a lamp stand as he held the lantern high. It was Sedric's fault he had come to this, he had decided. His lover had dreamed of gaining a fortune and moving far from Bingtown, to dwell together in luxury where they would not have to hide their relationship from Hest's wife or Bingtown society. Hest had told him not to be ridiculous, that they were fine as they were. Hest had had no wish to gamble his comfortable life. But, whether he willed it or not, Sedric had cast the dice for them. And instead of a fortune and a life of freedom in some exotic location, he had won slavery for Hest and whatever peculiar exile Sedric now endured.

He had heard the dreams of the Chalcedean dragon-hunters. Sedric had not imagined the vast value of dragon parts. For the first time, he wondered if Sedric had gained his ambition, had harvested blood or scales, sold them and gone off to live alone the dream that Hest had mocked. No. He had not. For if Sedric had taken such plunder to the Duke of Chalced or to any of the trade contacts they knew, these others would have known of it. Perhaps they would even have been able to go home, knowing that someone else had finished their terrible quest for them. And if Sedric had acquired a fortune, he would have come back to Hest and pleaded with him to go with him. Of that Hest was certain. Sedric would always come back to him.

So. What had become of Sedric and Alise? He did not much care why his frumpy little wife had not returned to him, but what had kept Sedric from his side? Being so deeply infatuated with Hest in his juvenile and romantic way, surely if Sedric could have come home, he would have, with or without dragon's blood to trade. And Captain Leftrin had claimed that both Alise and Sedric were alive. So much he had gleaned during his time in Trehaug and Cassarick.

‘What is that?' A man's cry, full of wonder and perhaps fear sent everyone scrambling to the rails to peer over the side. Had the dragon returned? But a glance at the lookout showed him pointing, not at the river but at the sky.

‘Parrots,' someone exclaimed in disgust. ‘Just a flock of blue and green parrots.'

‘And gold and silver and scarlet and blue,' another man cried.

‘They're a bit big for parrots …'

It was not a flock of birds startled from their canopy home. These creatures came on swift, wide wings, more batlike in motion than birdlike. They flew in formation like geese, and even the powerful down-strokes of their wings were orchestrated, as if someone called cadence for them. Hest stared with the others and felt blood drain from his face. His hands and feet tingled and he could not voice what someone finally shouted, his voice still tinged with disbelief:

‘Dragons! A flock of dragons!'

‘Fortune favours us! Ready your bows!' Lord Dargen shouted joyously. ‘Attack as they fly over us. Let us bring down one or two of them, and return home with our holds full of dragon parts!'

For the first time, Hest realized that the man was mad. Insane with fear for his family, believing that somehow he could get the magical items that would bring them safely to him when he returned home. Hest suddenly knew with terrible certainty that they were no longer alive, that they had died terribly, probably months ago, possibly screaming the Chalcedean's name as they perished.

This quest was all the man had left. It was only a fantasy. Even if he filled the ship with chunks of bloody meat and kegs of blood, there was no grand life for him to reclaim. To fulfil his mad goal would be as disastrous for him as to fail. But this was his life now and he was trapped in it as surely as he had imprisoned Hest in his madman's mission. Whatever doom he had brought upon himself, Hest would share. Weaponless, he stood and watched them come. Creatures of legend, glittering like gemstones against the endless grey sky, in the distance they looked more like adornments to a lady's elegant music-box than vengeful flying predators. All around him on the decks of both ships, men were running and shouting, stringing bows, demanding arrows of their fellows, limbering their arms with their throwing spears.
They have no idea
, Hest thought to himself. He had seen the blue dragon of Bingtown, Tintaglia, once. It had been in the distance, as he returned to Bingtown after she had driven off the Chalcedean warriors. He had thought her pretty then.