Dragon Venom (Obsidian Chronicles Book 3) (24 page)

"Interesting," the Mage said, leaning back slightly as if to gain a new perspective on him. "You seem very determined."

"I am a dragonheart, my lady, polluted by the monsters' venom.

Even as that damns me, it gives me certain advantages. Perhaps determination is one of them."

"An intriguing theory. If true, the dragons have brought their own doom upon themselves."

"I most assuredly hope so."

"As do I, Lord Obsidian, as do I. Perhaps you have realized that I have no love for the dragons?"

"I suspected as much, my lady; after all, is it not their puissance that keeps you from exploring the northern lands, should it please you to do so?"

"So it is, though I had not realized this was widely known in your homeland."

"It is not widely known, my lady, but I have taken a special interest in these matters."

"Of course you have. Fascinating." She studied him silently for a moment, then asked, "Why have you come to Pon Ashti? Why are you not hunting the dragons in the northern mountains where they lair?"

"Because my master has betrayed me," Arlian said, startled by the bitterness in his own voice, and the bluntness of his own words. "The Duke of Manfort has made peace with the dragons, in order to prevent further incursions upon the Borderlands."

"Has he? The spy did not mention that!"

Arlian hesitated, then asked, "My lady, who is this spy of whom you speak?"

The Mage smiled again, and blue light glittered from her teeth and shone from her eyes. "Did you not know? Can you not guess?" She paused, but Arlian merely looked at her expectantly until she said, "He is the dragons' spy in Pon Ashti, sent here to watch their borders."

"The dragons?"

Arlian had not considered that possibility. This city was so far from any known habitation of either dragons or dragonhearts that he had simply assumed their reach did not extend here in any way. Surely, they had not had a man following him all the way from Manfort!

"Yes. This fool somehow believed he could use sorcery here, in my own stronghold, without my knowledge. I demonstrated to him the error of his belief, and convinced him to tell me his purpose here, and what he had reported to his abominable masters."

"Then he followed me across the Desolation?"

"Oh, no!" She laughed, an inhuman sound that made Arlian's skin crawl and significantly worsened his headache. "Do not think yourself so important as that! He is a native of Pon Ashti, recruited some years ago and supplied with the means to converse with the dragons regardless of the intervening distance."

"Ah," Arlian said. He supposed that the means of communication was the simple sorcery of human blood in a bowl of water—he had used that himself in the past He had thought that the blood had to be that of a dragonheart, but perhaps he had erred in that assumption.

"I suppose this is some dark northern magic," the wizard said. "Certainly, I know of no such device."

"I believe I have heard such a thing mentioned," Arlian admitted.

"It operates only at the dragons' whim."

As he spoke he was trying to think. Did this mean that the Dragon Society had agents scattered everywhere? They could not have known he would come to Pon Ashti; he had not known it himself until he reached Orange River. This spy must have been positioned here for reasons having nothing to do with him.

Well, in this case, he could see no reason not to ask. While he knew that his enemy's enemy was not necessarily his friend, there was no reason to assume that the Blue Mage was openly hostile. So far, she had treated him well enough.

"Why did the dragons want a spy in Pon Ashti?" he asked.

"He claims not to know," she replied, all trace of her smile gone; she watched Arlian intently. "He maintains this position even under very noticeable duress. Given his interest in you, I thought you might have a guess to offer."

"I might," Arlian said, "but no more than a guess. My lady, I will tell you my guess, but might I beg a favor from you in exchange?"

"And what would be the nature of this favor?"

"Nothing untoward, I assure you. I wish only to learn more of the nature of wizards."

"The better to slay them, I suppose? This is not untoward?" She did not rise from the bench, but somehow she seemed larger and more threatening; the blue glow of her eyes changed to a darker hue, almost indigo. Her hair stirred, as if in a wind, though the air in the courtyard was utterly still.

"No, no, my lady! I promise you, that is by no means my intent! On the contrary, I would learn more so that I might better aid you!"

"Aid me in what fashion?" Her form remained swollen, her eyes dark.

"In encompassing the destruction of our common foe! I do not want to harm you; I want to destroy the dragons!"

"It was my understanding that you already know methods for slaying dragons, and have in fact killed a significant number of them."

"Of course, my lady—and if you will forgive my bluntness, we both know that if I had not done so, you could not rule freely in Pon Ashti.

The dragons' magic and your own would appear to be antithetical, unable to coexist."

She stared at him for a moment, then seemed to shrink again.

"An oversimplification," she said mildly, "but one with some basis in truth. Then you seek to learn more of wizards to turn our power against the dragons? But why would you need to do this, when you have your own proven methods?"

"I told you I have been betrayed, my lady; the Duke of Manfort makes peace with the dragons. He does so because he fears that you and the other creatures of the south will sweep northward across the Lands of Man as the dragons perish, and he prefers the familiar, however evil, to the unfamiliar. I came here to learn whether your rule might be so clearly superior to that of the dragons that he can be convinced to reconsider."

She stared at him silently for a moment, then said, "Tell me your guess as to why the dragons placed a spy among my people."

"To observe the decline in their own power, my lady. To measure, by the effectiveness of the sorcery he uses to communicate with them, how much their losses had weakened their control over these lands, so that they would be able to anticipate the inroads made by you and the other great powers of the south and act accordingly. Their embassy to the Duke was superbly timed, and surely your spy was one of the elements making such precision possible."

"I believe you might have hit upon it," she said, her eyes now a warm turquoise.

Hoping to take advantage of her apparent pleasure, he said quickly,

"I have told you my guess, my lady; might you grant me the boon I asked in return?"

"Tell you more of the nature of wizards?" She laughed again. "You will need to be more specific than that!"

"My lady, let us begin at the very beginning, then—what is a wizard?"

She laughed again, and Arlian thought his throbbing skull would crack. "I am a wizard," she said. "A creature of magic, spawned of earth and fire through a human host."

"Then you were human once? A mortal woman?"

"No. I grew within a woman's body, and then emerged as you see me now, in a semblance of her shape, but I am not that woman; I cast her flesh aside to die, her mind and body ruined by my birth, when I sprang from her mouth."

The pain in Arlian's temples was piercing and intense now, and he could not help raising one hand to his brow. "Do you mean . . . " He stopped and took a deep breath.

The Blue Mage's description of her origin sounded appallingly familiar, and he wondered why he had never guessed at this. After all, to some extent magic was magic, whether the subtle and delicate sorcery of Manfort or the flamboyant exercises of Arithei, whether incarnate in a dragon or manifest in a wizard.

He let his breath out, then said, "Do you mean that wizards incu-bate in human flesh, then burst forth, killing their hosts? All of them do this?"

"You have grasped it exactly."

"And what is it that first quickens a wizard in a human body? Is there some ichor t h a t . . " He stopped and closed his eyes without finishing the sentence; the pain in his head was unbearable.

"No ichor nor venom, no seed nor egg, save the raw magic of the earth and sky," the wizard replied. "The natural world is full of magic.

Lord Obsidian, ever seeking an outlet and a form, and when any wisp or current of that ubiquitous force chances upon a living thing, it seeps into it and takes form therein. If the host is man, woman, or child, and the power sufficient that the body's natural defenses cannot absorb it, then in a year and a day the magic bursts forth as a wizard; if it is a beast then a monster is spawned. T h e mindlessness of plants will yield mindless magical things that haunt the land to no purpose; the shapeless spreading of fungus or moss gives us bodiless dreams and figments."

Trying to think was becoming impossible; Arlian could no longer form complete sentences. "But the dragons," he said. " T h e y . . . their venom. A thousand years."

"The dragons are different," the Blue Mage said. "They suck all the magic from the land, and pass it to their offspring directly. I don't understand how—if I could do the same, I would. I can have no children, Obsidian, not by any means known to me. I can transform other creatures to suit my whims, guide the land's magic to manufacture demons and gaunts from men and animals, turn beasts to nightstalkers—I created your escort today from shadows and squirrels. But these things live only to serve me, they have no will of their own, and none can work magic in their turn. When I die my magic will disperse and return to the earth, until such time as its eddies and currents again collect it and carry the bits and pieces that were once me into contact with other living things, to spawn a hundred new creatures, none of them like me. The dragons, though—the dragons can spawn more dragons, damn them all."

She rose abruptly.

"My presence pains you," she said. "Rest; we will speak again later."

Arlian tried to make a polite protest, but the only sound that emerged was a dry croak.

Then the Blue Mage was gone, and sunlight flared up, and he lost consciousness.

21

The Spy

Arlian awoke stretched on a stone bench in a courtyard, the night sky above him strewn with bright stars; he stared up at them for a moment, trying to remember where he was.

And then he saw a figure standing over him, a dark shape blocking out the stars. Arlian sat up quickly, reaching for his common knife, only to find the sheath empty.

That brought the memories back, and he knew where he was: in the courtyard of the palace in Pon Ashti, the palace the Blue Mage had taken as her own—or perhaps, he thought, despite appearances, he should say its own. By the wizard's own description it had no true sex, and could not reproduce its kind.

The stars overhead meant that he had clearly been unconscious for hours; the last moment he remembered was early afternoon. His back was stiff from sleeping on the hard bench, and his head still throbbed dully, but the ghastly piercing pain the Mage's presence had caused was gone. The dim light in the courtyard was not blue, but the natural orange of torchlight—he could see brands set in brackets on each of the four walls.

And he could see the shadowy figure of a man holding a cord

between his hands. He had stepped back when Arlian awoke, and now stood a yard away, watching Arlian intently.

"What is it?" Arlian asked. "Who are you? Step into the light where I can see you." Even as he said this his eyes were adjusting, and Arlian could see that he was addressing a paunchy, middle-aged man in a pale robe.

The man cleared his throat. "Felicitations, my lord," he said. "I trust you slept well, and your headache is better?"

"Well enough, thank you," Arlian said. "I fear you have the advantage of me; to whom do I have the honor of speaking?"

"My name is unimportant," the man with the cord said, fidgeting.

Arlian smiled crookedly. There had been a time, long ago, when he had said the same thing, and had thereby acquired the nickname Trivial.

He was not inclined to share that name with this person.

"Say rather, you do not choose to give it," Arlian said. "As you will.

Are you in the Blue Mage's service, then?"

"I serve the rulers of this realm."

That plural seemed to confirm Arlian's suspicion—this man was almost certainly the dragons' spy. And that cord in his hands had doubtlessly been intended for Arlian's throat, but one did not survive fourteen years of war and attempted assassinations without learning to maintain a certain wariness even when asleep.

"And do you think, sir, that the Blue Mage will permit you to live if you kill me beneath her roof?"

"You know?" The man lunged forward, cord stretched taut.

Arlian raised a hand to intercept it, but the man was quicker and stronger than he looked, and pushed the cord up over Arlian's fingers before Arlian could get a good hold. The cord caught Arlian under the chin, and pushed him back; the bench on which he sat rocked backward under this pressure, and Arlian toppled over. The two men tumbled down into the flowerbed, the would-be assassin atop his intended victim, the cord pressing into Arlian's throat.

This was a worse situation than Arlian had anticipated; he had assumed he would be able to hold his attacker off easily, but had misjudged both his opponent's prowess and his own stability on the stone bench. He was not seriously worried yet, though, as he pressed at his foe with his left hand and reached for the buttons of his blouse with his right.

No one in this palace would have a steel blade, nor silver, which was presumably why the spy was using a garrote, but that did not mean Arlian was unarmed—and his weapon was one that he very much

doubted anyone in service to the Dragon Society would carry.

The man's weight bearing him down onto the flowers made it difficult to reach his knife, but even the strongest strangler needed a few minutes to kill; he had time.

"I'm sorry, Obsidian," the spy grunted, as he struggled to cross the ends of his cord behind Arlian's back. "They promised me venom if I killed you—a thousand years of life!"