That “something,” whatever it might prove to be, was already enough to raise the hackles on the Alban’s neck. “I will not draw this man’s blood,” he said, because it was something that had to be said no matter who it annoyed. If Garet had not been forced to this, then maybe he would have had fewer scruples; but Aldric had been King Rynert’s—assassin? Executioner? Duty-bound, honor-bound, reluctant slayer… Once. But never again; not for any man.
He tried to think of some stratagem with which to end this matter quickly, before someone was hurt. Before
he
was hurt, since Voord wasn’t going to be satisfied with just seeing a few welts and bruises. Not with his broken face to remind him of what Aldric had done.
They took guard again, but slowly now, warily and with a deal more care than the nonchalance of their first exchange, and the
taidyin
touched. Clack. Wood ran against wood, notched surfaces ticking as the pressure of wrists increased. There was a shuffling sound—someone’s feet—and a moment’s stillness. Clack. Another stillness, when nothing moved but mind and eyes. Then clack; clack-stamp, and Garet launched a cut—a proper cut this time, downward and diagonal to strike neck or shoulder, hard, fast and direct.
It was easy.
Aldric moved not back but forward, dropping to one knee, intersecting the arc of Garet’s cut with his own
taidyo
as it whirred up and across. Gripped in both hands, his wrists counterflexing on the long hilt for leverage, the last six inches of the hardwood blade jumped from near-immobility to an unseen blur. And it hit squarely home within an inch of his aiming point—not on Garet’s own weapon, to block, but on the Drusalan’s tensed, extended forearm. To break. He shouted, once: “
Hai!”
The mail that Garet wore was no protection, no protection at all; transmitted all the shock of the blow clear through whatever minimal padding was beneath, and even over the harsh rasp of oak against linked metal Aldric heard both forearm-bones give way.
Garet yelped thinly and released his
taidyo
to clatter across the floor, but before it had come to rest he followed it, crashing headlong to the ground as the follow-through accelerated down and all but tore the kneecap from his braced right leg.
He lay there, squirming and trying not to scream, while Aldric cat-stepped backwards with an expression of distaste stamped into his features. The other
tau-kortagor
, Tagen, barged past him and knelt at Garet’s side to check his injuries. Aldric could hear his muttered curse quite plainly, for it had grown very quiet in Lord General Goth’s great conference hall: quiet—and expectant.
“Well?” Voord asked it, his thick voice free now of all passion, anger or even interest.
“The arm is cleanly broken, lord; it should heal. But…” Tagen hesitated, and looked up at Voord before saying any more. “But he’ll not walk without a stick, if he ever walks again.”
“So. Small use to me, then. Why am I surrounded by incompetents?” he demanded of the air. No one troubled to supply him with an answer and he flung both arms wide in an exaggerated shrug of disgust and dismissal. The blood on his face was drying black. “At least they only ever fail me once.
Tagen, sh’voda moy: ya v’lech’hu, kh’mnach voi! Slijei
?”
“
Slij’hah, hautach
!” Tagen jerked his shortsword from its scabbard and rammed two inches of its point into the nape of Garet’s neck. The injured man’s eyes opened wide, all whites with just a pinpoint spot of pupil, and his mouth gaped silently; then his legs went kick-kick, kick… And he was dead.
Aldric forced his own bunched muscles to relax, quite sure that he was the only one to even react. That was worst of all, for in his innermost heart he had anticipated something like this and then dismissed it as beyond even Voord. It had been the “something” in the atmosphere which had disturbed him before they began to fight. He should have been on his guard, responded differently, not given Voord a reason to… to do what had been done. Then maybe a life would not have been wasted, spilled without purpose across the polished floor.
But what better way in all the world to impress a man known to be careless of killing—a man even nicknamed Bladebearer Deathbringer, by the holy Light of Heaven!—than to prove oneself more careless still. That was how Voord’s mind had worked, even to the extent of having his own guard killed for the failure of losing a duel. Just to impress! It was appalling. But that was Voord, and at the last that was the Secret Police. And that was the Drusalans, for they had all connived at it, Goth and Bruda both, knowing what might happen—no, knowing what
would
happen—but saying not a word against it.
Aldric looked at them, and looked at the blood—dear God, so very little blood to mark a death!—and for once kept his thoughts entirely to himself.
“I often wondered why you had such an interest in
ymeth
,” said Dewan. He was trying to strike up a conversation again, for what felt like the hundredth time. Even an argument would be better than the gloomy silence which had settled over Gemmel since their interview—and “interview” scarcely described it—with the Drusalan woman who called herself Kathur the Vixen. If ever anyone talked too much, she did; and Dewan suspected that Gemmel’s use of the dreamsmoke drug was no more than a contributory factor.
She
talked, he thought idly, staring at Gemmel’s back as they rode along on tired, hired horses. Well then, some of the men who had shared her bed must have been regular speech-makers, and it had all come spilling out, as unselective as an up-ended bucket. They had heard about the governor of Tuenafen; about the governor’s son and his stableboy; about two of the seaport’s magistrates and how they liked to relax after a hard day administering the Empire’s justice. All of it had been fascinating in a small way, even though Gemmel obviously disapproved of most of it, and it would have been most useful had they planned to stay in Tuenafen and set up as professional blackmailers. But they had also heard about Aldric, and what
Kagh’ Ernvakh
had planned for him,
Dewan had laughed, as he felt certain Aldric would also have laughed at the notion of rescuing a captive princess from a lofty tower. But the laughter had been of short duration and Gemmel had not joined it. This matter ceased to be a child’s tale and a source of amuse-ment when it involved a friend and the risk of that friend’s death. And Dewan was well aware that Gemmel regarded Aldric as much more than a friend; he had heard the title
altrou—
foster-father—used by the younger man on more than one occasion.
The risk was greatly increased by a factor which Ka-thur had named several times: the Imperial officer called
Hautheisart
Voord. She had been Voord’s lover once, and then his mistress, five years ago—for all that even then his tastes had tended to the exotic, rather than the conventionally erotic. Voord, Dewan had decided, was peculiar. But to be promoted
hautheisart
at the age of twenty-seven bespoke a mind and an ability that was out of the ordinary in much more than merely sexual preferences.
They knew now where that warped genius lay. Voord was a gamester, a gambler, a player of one side against another and both sides for himself. His games extended far back, beyond the death of old Emperor Droek and the division of the Empire. They continued through that division and right up to the present day: complex, self-serving and often murderous. Voord still played both sides, although there seemed of late to be a marked preference for one over the other—but Voord still worked hardest for Voord. There had been vague talk from Kathur about an attempt to control an isolated province on the Jevaiden plateau and transform it into an independent, neutral city-state—supporting and supported by the Emperor and the Grand Warlord both. It was a plan which had come to nothing for various reasons.
One of those reasons had been a certain Alban clan-lord, sent there about his king’s business and still ignorant of what he had upset.
Not that this was the first time Aldric and Voord had crossed paths in ignorance. Oh no. Voord himself had evidently talked far too much in bed in his younger days; presumably less mature, less confident—but quite certainly just as coldly cynical. He had talked about his first-ever great stratagem, originated solely by himself; the plan which had gained his first promotion, that long, long leap of one rank that so few men made—from
kor-tagor
to
eldheisart
, and with it the transfer from infantry to secret police.
That plan had broken half-a-dozen of the Empire’s notoriously strict laws against sorcery by its very inception, and was pushed through by—significantly—Grand Warlord Etzel’s personal intervention. And no wonder he supported it; at that time the plan was certain to attract him, in his then-current uncertain position with the Imperial dominions at peace and questions being asked in the Senate as to whether the rank and title of Grand Warlord should in fact be done away with. It was a simple plan: the despatch of a man to a place, with instructions to create sufficient havoc for military intervention to be justified.
The plan which, four long years ago, had sent Duergar Vathach to Dunrath.
It was an operation which Kathur should never have known about, because it was a failure. That failure had done something to the way in which Voord’s mind worked; it seemed now that failure was the worst sin in his canon and the one most drastically punished. But she had heard all about it—maybe because it was his first, maybe because despite its lack of success it had done no damage to his career—and maybe because in those days there had been no such thing as
sides
within the Drusalan Empire. Emperor and Warlord had been twin figureheads on the one ship, Dewan knew that much: he had been a part of it, and knew that the oneness was that of a puppeteer and his doll. But it explained Voord’s openness as nothing else could.
Only fear had kept Kathur’s mouth shut, and it had needed sorcery-assisted drugs—or drug-enhanced sorcery, Dewan was uncertain of precedence—to open it again. The great question now in his mind was: what would happen if, or when, Aldric found out? If he hadn’t found out already. Either way, if he was still alive he would need help—all the help that they could bring to bear.
Gemmel rode on, sagging in the saddle and looking far from comfortable. He was usually a good horseman, certainly better than some Dewan had seen—although as an e
x-eldheisart
in the Bodyguard at Drakkesborg, he conceded that he was often over-critical—but right now the old wizard’s mind seemed occupied by more than even the elementary, instinctive knee-grip and balance which kept him on his rented pony’s back. Gemmel had been subject to broody periods like this ever since they landed in Imperial territory; indeed, ever since they had seen the white contrail of the dragon scratched across the cold blue vault of heaven. For the life of him Dewan could not understand why, because even he—unimaginative military crophead that he was—had been thrilled to the core of his being by the sight. It had not mattered that he had seen Ymareth before; in the Cavern of Firedrakes it had been somehow appropriate. Just—
just
?—one more strange and marvelous thing among so many other marvels. But in the open sky, with nothing to detract from its distant grandeur—although in truth, at two miles above his head it had been no bigger than a sparrow, and only the stately leisure of its wingbeats had shown it for what it truly was; that, and the condensing trail of heat from its mouth—the sight of a dragon in flight was another matter entirely. Dewan’s drinking of a toast to the great being’s mere existence had been sincere, not mockery.
So what was wrong with Gemmel? Dewan looked at him again and wondered idly if it was worth-while wasting more breath in yet another attempt to cajole the old man into speech. Deciding not, he hunched himself deeper into the furred hood of his cavalry cloak.
There had been no dragon in the sky today—nor, for that matter, any blue sky for one to fly across. Only an overcast that was as gray and featureless as new-split slate. By the Alban calendar it was
Hethra-tre, de Gwen-yer;
the Drusalan reckoning, for once, put it in more simple terms: the third day of the tenth month, and three days into winter. The year was winding down—and the weather just at present was trying hard to prove it. Today had started badly and grown steadily, malevolently worse, progressing from a nonexistent dawn lost in slanting rain, through a chill, and sleet, to a proper fall of snow. That at least was over for the present, but it had already transformed the countryside through which they rode into an ink-wash study; all light and darkness, chiaroscuro. Everything was either black or white, stark, toneless, without any subtlety of shading beneath that leaden sky which was so heavy with the promise of more snow. Dewan glared at it, and was answered as he might have expected by a quick flurry of fat, soft flakes. And it was cold. The breath of men and horses alike went smoking from their nostrils to drift like skeins of fog on the bitter, barely moving air. Like the breath of dragons.
Dewan ar Korentin wiped a crust of hoar-frost from his mustache, itself become as black-and-white as the landscape, and exhaled a soft oath on his next billow of breath.
Cold
, he thought, watching the vapor twist heavily away from his face.
So cold
. His eyes abruptly shifted focus as
something
drew their attention to the middle distance. A movement, or a suggestion of movement; a flickering, like a gnat’s dance on warm summer air, caught at the edge of sight. Except that this was by no means summer, and whatever he had seen was no gnat.
There, look
! No. It was gone again—if it had ever been there. Dewan blinked; maybe it was a speck of moisture caught on his eyelashes, or a bird—although he had seen no birds today, they had too much sense to travel in such foul weather—or maybe no more than a trick of his imagination. He turned his head away, dismissing it.
And then snapped back, not believing, to gape as the thing he was convinced he had not seen came scything out of the low cloudbase like some monstrous bat with a ribbon of black smoke scrawling like charcoal to mark its line of descent.