Fugitive Prince (62 page)

Dakar never knew how the last came to die. The butchery ended too quickly. Nothing alive remained standing to kill. Seardluin stalked narrow eyed through the razed carnage, their frenzy of bloodlust unsated. They slashed and snapped at the slain underfoot, while the rent limbs of horses and men shuddered through the tormented spasms of flesh torn untimely from life.

The furnace-dry breeze wafted the reek of ripped bowels and the stench of violent death. Dakar’s bay gelding and Arithon’s mare sidled in demented fear. The gray trembled, with Felirin doubled over the pommel of his saddle in the throes of a gut-rending nausea.

The spell cantrip on the horses was fading. The Mad Prophet yanked the mare’s bit before flight instinct could revert into stampeding terror, then curbed his own milling horse by forcing its panic into frustrated circles. While Arithon’s mount jibbed and jolted against the lead rein, he shook off stunned shock and strove through a virulent attack of the shakes to sort out what mage-sight now showed him.

“Those men, those horses had no auras,” he forced out in a strained whisper. “If they were alive when they entered this grimward, they became
changed
into something unnatural.”

As though the recent deaths had not signified, no shocked discharge of animal magnetism hazed the air with blank light; and yet, the Seardluin had tracked every hapless victim that they slaughtered on sight.

Felirin straightened, wrung pale as a specter. “What are you saying?” He wiped his mouth with the back of a wrapped hand, and insisted with gritty disbelief, “Those were guardsmen from Hanshire.
I knew them.”

Behind, on the dune, amid the strewn gore of carnage, the predators crouched down to gorge. Snarls carried downwind, punched through the snap of cracked bone. The horrors worried their kills as they ate, tearing and ripping through meat and entrails with greedy, savage abandon.

Dakar’s stomach turned. “I don’t care if those men were your milk brothers from childhood, we’d better get out of here,
now!”

The slightest release of his hold on the rein, and the horses he gripped plunged ahead. Dakar resisted their snorting, brash lunges.
He could do nothing more than cling to blind faith that their party would not be attacked. Headlong flight could not outstrip a Seardluin’s charge. If he gave way to nerves and let the horses gallop on, the loose sand would tire them beyond any chance of recovery.

Felirin eased his jigging gray up beside Dakar’s flank. “Why don’t those drake-spawned furies see our presence?”

Dakar swallowed hard, yet the rank taste of bile stayed with him. “I can but guess. In some way, we haven’t crossed fully into their realm of existence. We traverse a dream. Our lives are not part of it, but only passing through.”

“Those guards,” Felirin started, then coughed back a heaving spasm. Wretched beyond speech, he shook his head.

“I can’t know for certain.” The mare plunged ahead, yanked short yet again by Dakar’s iron hold on the reins. Swearing, he lost another patch of raw skin before he resumed his snagged thought. “Those men must have interfered with the dream in some way. Dragons are unruly and powerful beings, a law unto themselves. Their conscious minds could seed life. Why not the reverse? If a man in careless ignorance killed game in the wood, or lit a small fire for comfort, then a thread of continuity would be torn by his act. A kinetic balance would become inadvertently upset. In forfeit, the drake might well bleed off the offender’s life aura, and knit the repossessed magnetic energies into the dream’s fabric to restore the gap.”

“Ath’s mercy on them,” Felirin murmured, his sad, lined eyes fixed ahead. “If you speak the truth, they are lost for all eternity, and yet, their fear and their suffering was no less for the fact that their spirits were unstrung before death.”

Dakar had no word of comfort to assuage the minstrel’s sorrowful insight. Nor did he dare broach the evil possibility that Arithon’s unguarded mind may have seeded that vortex of killing violence. He nursed his tired mount over loose, sliding sand, or the brittle salt of cracked hardpan. Though the site of the slaughter might lie behind, the ugly memory persisted, too vivid and sharp to unburden. A man led in circles by worry and privation could not help but imagine what fates might befall the rest of the company from Hanshire, drawn here in determined and foolhardy duty, and left to the perils of their ignorance.

Other packs of Seardluin prowled the desert. More than one clawed spoor stitched across the spiraling track carved out by the horses’ labored passage. By the wayside, the hacked and gutted corpse of a young dragon lay broken. Splayed wing leather shriveled, half-silted under blown sand, and the ripped coils of entrails were
strewn like sun-blackened rope in clots of rank, congealed blood. Here, most oddly, Dakar sensed the hazed energies of torn life force; as though the continuum of Fate’s Wheel still contained the unmoored wraith of this creature’s whole being at the moment an untimely death claimed it. The enigma gave rise to a headache, out of phase with the throb of his skinned palms. Dakar endured. He refused to acknowledge the chorus of complaint from an overweight body kept in the saddle too long. Nor would he hear the fool’s urge to dismount and ease the discomfort of racked joints.

To guess by the pug marks pressed into stained sand, the Seardluin which had stalked the slain drake weighed as much as a draft horse.

Then that kill, too, fell behind. As the riders’ blown mounts breasted another crest in the dunes, the desert with its perils melted away, replaced by what seemed like a southland orchard gone wild. Glossy leaves rustled, stirred by kind winds to a ruffled embroidery of orange blossom.

Another chill puckered the hair at Dakar’s nape. No natural trees should bear ripened fruit and spring flowers in the same season. Almost, it seemed as if the grove was presented in temptation, inviting tired travelers to forget the firm strictures by which they might walk this existence unscathed.

“Don’t pick any fruit,” the Mad Prophet cautioned. He wondered in stark honesty whether Arithon’s deranged guilt could be party to this latest invention; or whether Felirin’s loose fancy offered the deadly peril of a sleepy, spring grove whose climate encouraged tired travelers to linger.

Those creeping suspicions entwined with another current, elusive and powerful, but
there
as a sparkle of unseen energy that invaded the periphery of vision. Dakar knew spellcraft. Step upon step, his suspicion gained impetus, that
something
or some power tempered each new train of event, and dammed back the cascade of disaster. Yet each time he tested to fathom the source, the currents he searched for slipped past him.

Felirin brushed a shower of shed petals from his hair, too pained and dispirited to indulge his ebullient imagination. His gray was stumbling tired, and fretful in its efforts to evade its rope muzzle and snatch at the knee-high grass under the fruit trees. Out of pity, the bard dismounted to walk.

For the bay mare, they could offer no such relief. Arithon remained fallen into a stupor. The drawn angles of his face were mercifully eclipsed by the shadow of the drover’s cloak, and his hands dangled slack from the restraints which secured him to the saddlebow. He
would not arouse, despite Dakar’s efforts. Even a spell-turned invocation to his Name failed to raise any flicker of awareness. If the last s’Ffalenn prince was lost in the dreaming quagmire of his conscience, the combined debilitation of backlash and despair would find no healing in this place. Nor could aught be done to reverse his deep malady, but keep on and hope for the relief of escape.

“We can’t journey on indefinitely without water,” Felirin husked at long length.

Dakar drew rein, sucked clean of the will to laugh for the irony. “We aren’t likely to find water here. If we did, it would be too risky to drink.”

“What makes you sure?” No matter how desperate his state of privation, the bard’s curiosity knew no bounds.

“Great dragons hated a drenching worse than a cat does, or so Sethvir once explained.” Dakar stamped back the ripe fear that threatened an explosion of temper. His nerves were drawn wire. He heaved his fat bulk from the saddle and almost collapsed in a heap from the spike of sharp pain which shot through his cramped knees and hips. In mulish rebellion against abused dignity, he pursued his thought to the end. “Rainstorms were said to send the great drakes into rampaging fits of irritation. That’s just as well. We dare not interact with anything we didn’t bring with us. Heed well. The penalty could be to share the same fate as those foolish guardsmen from Hanshire.”

The minstrel breathed in the incongruous, sweet tang of the orange trees, morose. “For a creature that gloried in live flame, wet weather would naturally pose a problem.” The tightening scabs on his burns made him seem a slouched and arthritic old man. “How long do you suppose we can survive in this place?”

The Mad Prophet had no answer that did not offer outright discouragement.

Overhead, the sky burned a lingering gold, lucent as marigold enamel. The grove melted away like a lifted curtain into a wind-beaten vista of steppelands. Dakar set his back to the task of driving on balky horses without help from the switch he needed, but dared not braid, out of plucked stems of tough grass. He could not fathom how far they had traveled, nor yet, how much longer they could venture without falling victim to lethal mishap.

Seemingly out of nowhere, the deep, booming note of a centaur’s horn call shook the ground, answered like echo by the clarion reply of a mature male dragon. Felirin stopped short with a gasped cry of wonder.

Dakar stared also, amazed and gaping. High over the beaten-brass furrows of the plain, a mated pair of dragons cavorted, sleek as shot quarrels as they closed leathered wings and swooped from the zenith to the horizon. Sun-caught scales flashed fire like tipped gold, and tails streamed and snapped like armored ribbon. No legend, no awed description, even from Sethvir’s keen memory, could do justice to the searing, unworldly grace of the great drakes at their prime strength. Before their vast size, the Khadrim were as toys, and the wyverns of Vastmark no more than petty and quarrelsome vermin.

The drakes spiraled upward and dwindled to gilt flecks, lost at last in the molten brass dome of clear sky.

Dakar expelled a gusty sigh, brought back to awareness that he had suspended his breathing.

Felirin shed his awe in an uncharacteristic bent of practicality. “Before we see more inhospitable country, do you suppose we’d be wise to rest?”

“Better to push on,” the Mad Prophet disagreed. “Whatever is spinning this dream we experience, it’s being tempered by some outside influence.” He resisted another tug at the reins as the mare tried again to snatch grass. “I can’t imagine the immensity of power needed to stabilize this existence enough to allow for our presence, but there won’t be a second chance should we outstay the limit set on our welcome.”

In stark proof of concern, the ground changed again. Plains and grass flowed away, replaced by volcanic rock and a blackened, clogged sky. The air churned with smoke like stirred sludge, and the footing rippled with heat haze. Jagged stacks of porous rock notched the scarp, scoured to red veins where magma had leached glowing sores through the crust.

The horses tossed their heads, sidling, tails high and nostrils distended. Their hooves clanged on rock, a rugged array of slabbed basalt ledges, seamed with the angry flows of lava and bubbling, sulfurous mud pots.

“If this is a drake’s dream,” the Mad Prophet ventured, “what we now cross would be their preferred habitat.” He broke off, forced to cough from the acidic bite of swirled ash. “Sethvir told me once the dragons used to roll in molten rock the way birds splash their feathers in a rain puddle. Burned the dross off new scales as a snake would shed an old skin.”

Had the horses not been dull with exhaustion, main force could not have coerced them to abide such a crossing. The ground was hot enough to blister through boot leather, and singe nasal membranes at

each breath. Scoured eyes streamed hot tears. The porous, sharp edges of solidified lava slit skin at a glancing touch.

Suffering still from smoke-damaged lungs, Felirin hacked and spluttered. Then Arithon’s mare gashed her fetlock in a stumble. Though she moved lame, Dakar feared to stop. The ground was unstable. Too much could go wrong if they tarried to shift the prince’s slack form to another mount.

“If we linger, we’ll sicken,” he rasped through a raw larynx. “The fumes here are poison.”

No choice remained but push on, each stumbling stride accomplished in unalloyed misery. Through the plodding, grim labor, Dakar could not tell if the spiral they walked seemed smaller and tighter, or whether the effect was the offshoot of headache and dizziness. Feathered drifts of ash caved in to hide tracks. Canyons of etched lava confounded each effort to sight lines for orientation. He could scarcely manage the task of tugging his horse and Arithon’s forward. All hope was lost if the spiral’s last coils departed from a safe track.

At weary length, the lava flows faded to smoking pits of used ash. The stone smoothed, bleached to a powdery, fine dust as clinging as pulverized porcelain. Smoke and fumes leached away to a turbid, blank haze, and the heat ebbed to dry, cruel cold.

No moss grew; no trees. What passed for sky seemed a drumhead of cloud, stretched the flat, dull pallor of scraped chalk. Against that unmarked, monochrome backdrop, a skeleton loomed like spired iron. The ribs spanned through air in vast, gabled arches. Long, scything horns on the knobs of each vertebra spiked upright, a gigantic array of pronged tusks. The bones gleamed a glossy, unearthly pearl white, with stripped cartilage lucent as quartz.

“Dragon,” breathed Felirin. He blinked, rubbed soot from gummed eyelids. The splayed, flint black curves of three talons pierced the ground, of a size to paralyze reason. A destrier could have walked underneath without hindrance. Speechless, stunned, the minstrel stared, riveted. “Ath, the terrible size of her!”

Dakar as well felt his flesh bathed in chills. As a child, he had seen living Paravians, whom none could encounter without change. This behemoth wreckage was long dead, and yet, it commanded a presence which rankled his nerves into shivers. No feat of mortal imagination could capture the monumental grandeur of what
was
scribed in these glyphs of naked bone.