The Dragon Lord (14 page)

Kathur rolled over and raised her head to stare at him. Without any surprise. She had been crying, and she was crying now, the great tears gleaming like gemstones below those sapphire eyes which Aldric would have doubted had the ability to weep. And on her face—that beautiful, imperious, wanton face—was an expression of aching loss and desolation such as the Alban had seen only once before.

Go now, Kyrin-ain. The words were all said long ago.

“So you know.”

He stamped savagely into a boot and began to fight with its lacings. “Yes-I-
do
!” The last word came out on a grunt of effort. “And I should have known it long ago!” There was something very close to panic in the way he moved—and it was a panic only barely held in check, for when part of his shirt caught on something he took no time to work it free but simply jerked with all his strength. There was a quick rending noise and he swore viciously in Alban. As he tucked the ripped shirt into his leather riding-breeches, he turned a narrow watchful stare towards Kathur. “When will they come for me?” It was an idle question, and he had not expected an answer, but…

“At—at the Hour of the Fox.”

Aldric lifted an unamused eyebrow. “How apt, dear Vixen. How bloody droll. And your own idea, I suppose?”

“No, I…”

“But that’s—” he hurriedly converted the clumsy Drusalan reckoning in his head, “—ten at night. Two hours from now. So how was I to be kept here? By you? Or by…” His eyes flicked once towards the slender signal-cord, and his voice hardened. “Who did you call?”

“One of my servants.” Kathur paused, but once she had begun the weight of her own guilty confession drove her into saying more. “My—my bodyguard; the man you met before.”

“Ahh…” It was no more than an exhalation of breath, but it came out past an icy smile which grew fractionally wider once Aldric had lifted Widowmaker and looped her shoulder-strap over his head. There was a minute click as he thumbed the
taiken’s
safety-collar clear of her scabbard mouth. “Then I might just test a theory which crossed my mind when we met before. But only if he gets in my way. Because I’m leaving, lady. Now.” A final glance about the room confirmed that nothing had been left behind—except for the large measure of self-respect which would take him such a long time to regain. Aldric turned to go, and then looked back. “Anyway, he’s late. Just when did you expect him to appear?”

The bedroom door behind him was wrenched open, and above the sudden frantic clamour of alarms inside his head he heard Kathur’s response quite clearly:

“Now.”

Aldric didn’t pause to marvel at that perfect cue. He convulsed sideways at right-angles to the line from his back to the doorway, and he did so with the thickness of a wolfskin vest to spare. Literally.

Something monstrous plucked a puff of black fur from the right shoulder of his
coyac
just as it wrenched out from underneath the blow, and he heard the
whutt
! of parting air as that same something continued down to smash into the floor.

It was a mace: a flanged, iron-headed horror on a haft almost as long as he was tall, and as it tore free of the floor with a groan of raptured timbers he could see that it was being wielded as easily as he might use a riding-quirt. This footsoldier’s bludgeon was meant to flatten fully-armored men like beetles, and if it struck squarely against his unprotected body it would…

But that didn’t make any sense! Kathur had taken a deal of trouble to hold him here of what amounted to his own free will, presumably to deliver him intact and healthy to… someone. So why was this hulking servant so set on smearing him across the floor? Jealousy? Never mind wondering why—he was trying to do it and that was enough.

Aldric flinched clear of another ponderous swing; this one ploughed through a dressing-table, stinging him with splintered wood and the perfumed shards of cosmetic jars. His eyes went cold. Long years of training took the place of an instinctive fear-reaction and his right hand flicked to Widowmaker’s hilt, gripped, drew, and then faltered with no more than a double span of blade clear of the scabbard.

Yet completing that draw would have meant a certain kill.

Completing that draw would have extended into
ach-rankai
, the inverted cross, first of the classic
taiken
forms and a movement so ingrained by constant practice that it had become almost a reflex.

Completing that draw…

Would have whipped an unseen blur of steel beneath the servant’s chin and down between his eyes. Would have opened his throat spine-deep and split his face asunder from hairline to chin in a single splattering instant long before he could have dodged or blocked. Or even realized what was happening.

Completing that draw would have solved many problems. So why not?

So why? Aldric shook his head as if dislodging a cobweb and looked again at Kathur. “Call him off, lady!” There was no fear in his voice, nothing that might have been prompted by cowardice but a faint, elusive undertone that might have been compassion. And yet the woman said nothing. “Do it!
Teü’aj hah, tai-ura
!”

Kathur returned the stare with blank eyes for just a moment, seeming not to notice his sudden perfect command of High Drusalan. Then she surveyed the tableau that was her shattered bedroom: all harsh light and shadow now, the bright corridor beyond the open door a stark contrast to the intimately dim interior. One of the gilded lamps had been upset, and the thick sweetness of its scented oil was another element of the nightmare which assaulted all her senses. She blinked.

And the stone of Echainon went dull. Perhaps it was the woman’s sudden distraction towards her own possessions; perhaps it was Aldric’s concern with survival more than personal honor; perhaps it was the weariness of a firedrake and a sorcerer in places far away. Perhaps it was none of these things. But when the stone’s light died it was result, not reason, that was important.

Kathur blinked again—stared at Aldric—then said crisply, “Commander Voord be damned. Kill him.”

A heartbeat’s worth of utter shock slowed the Alban’s reaction, and maybe the man with the mace had been deliberately, deceptively clumsy in his earlier attacks. Because this time when the great iron cudgel moved, it moved far faster than it had ever done before.

And Aldric dropped on the spot.

If he had moved in any direction other than straight down the weapon would have caught him—and pulped him—somewhere along its horizontal arc; even then he felt a tug at his hair which was not the wind of its passing but the metal shaft itself. The mace-head had gouged deeply, uselessly, across the wall where he had been standing; but it would have gouged there anyway, heedless of the meagre resistance offered by his chest.

“You fool! Kill him now!” There was ugliness in Ka-thur’s voice, the audible equivalent of that expression he had not been meant to see, and as he rolled to his feet with Isileth Widowmaker fully drawn at last, Aldric’s lips curled back from his teeth in a snarl of almost animal intensity. It might… must… have been that wild scramble across the floor which lifted the pelt of the black wolfskin
coyac;
but for just an instant its fur was bristling across the Alban’s shoulders as though it were a part of him.

And for that same instant—a freezing, burning, malicious and utterly dishonorable sliver of time—Aldric’s mind was flooded with just one consideration: whether he could spare the fraction of a second needed for a snap-step right and the lashing backhand which would carve a memento of his company on Kathur’s face that she would carry to the grave.

Then he squashed the notion, dismissing it. Because it was unworthy of a
kailin-eir;
because it was unAlban; because it was unTalvalin. And because consideration said he couldn’t spare the time to do it after all.

The moon is only five days clear of new, dear Aldric
. The accusing voice inside his head had Gemmel’s intonation.
What would you have done had it been nearer full
?

Aldric exhaled through his nose with a sound like an angry tomcat’s hiss. He couldn’t have said against whom the anger was directed, and had no wish to dwell on it.

Circumstances forbade that, for the servant was ready for him with the mace poised in what, had it been a[* *]sword, would have been middle guard center. He eyed the man’s posture with a gaze that was still flinty with concentration but which had lost the gem-like killing glitter. It had leached out—or something was holding it well in check. Who or what, and why, he neither knew nor questioned. “Don’t blame me for this,” he said in the Jouvaine language, his tone almost regretful.

Then he moved.

Isileth Widowmaker thrust out as precisely as a pointing finger, in low line beneath all the blocks and parries that might have been made from mid-guard, and met only the slightest tug of resistance from firm flesh.

She drove deep, and twisted half around as she withdrew.

The big servant’s eyes bulged from his skull and his mouth gaped wide even though he was too shocked to utter more than an unstructured whine. The mace was louder, clanking against the floor as his hands released it to scrabble at ruptured tissue. Then he too fell sideways to the floor. Aldric watched him fall, then flicked blood from his sword with a whipping, economic gesture and returned the
taiken
to its scabbard with an arid whisper of metal on wood. He was smiling.

Through the scarlet-shot gray mist of pain clouding his vision, the fallen servant saw that smile and knew the reasoning which lay behind it. His body, uselessly tensed against the follow-through that would finish him, relaxed. There would be no killing blow. He tried to smile in turn; only a small, twisted grimace, but enough to show that he understood.

He was meant to live.

Widowmaker would make no widow tonight. She had pierced the Drusalan’s leg rather than his body, and had passed outside the bone to avoid the great blood-vessel which ran through the muscles of the inner thigh. It was a fierce wound, and one which the man would remember for a long time: the sort of injury which aches at the onset of damp weather. But he would be alive to remember it, and feel it ache. And he would recover.

Eventually…but not now. Now was for bleeding, and for hurting—and for realising that the dead do neither.

The man’s smile went slack and crooked as his senses left him, but Aldric had seen the faltering expression and he nodded, once. His shoulders sagged a little with relief; something which had shown already in his smile and had been recognised as such. Relief at his own survival; and relief that Isileth Widowmaker, that ancient and sometimes wilful blade, had done no more than he intended her to do.

Kathur was still staring at him as he straightened his back, but now her eyes were blank and held as little emotion as the sapphire gemstones they so much resembled. Her mouth worked, trying to form words or maybe curses, but no sound emerged.

Aldric passed one hand across the ruffled fur covering his shoulder, and the action was not so much that of settling a disarrayed garment as of stroking something alive. He remembered, coldly and calmly, how he had wanted to mark this woman. To hurt her. It was like the memory of actions in a dream, without weight in waking life. There was a place for such behaviour, and a time, but it was neither here nor now. Seghar citadel under the Geruath overlords was both long ago and far away; but as a small shudder crawled through the Alban’s body he realized that it was not yet long or far enough.

Inclining his head curtly towards Kathur the Vixen, Aldric walked from her room without a backward glance.

Thus he did not see the
telek
snatched from a hiding-place under the mattresses and levelled at his back.

Nor did he see the weapon waver and then drop from hands which were as powerless to squeeze its trigger as they were to stem a flow of silent tears. Had he seen, or had he heard a sob, it might have made some slight difference; or it might not. But he did not see, and did not hear, and it did not.

Somewhere in the too-quiet house a clock chimed the triple note which marked the turning of another hour. Unlike their Alban counterparts, Imperial Drusalan timepieces did not—indeed, by reason of the named hours, could not—strike a number; they merely drew attention to whatever image was indicated by their single ornate pointer. Aldric did not enter the room to look. He already knew as much as any Alban ever wanted to know about the clumsy, inexact system. But because he did not look, he did not know what hour it was. Or how much time he had to spare for making his escape.

Two hours from now
, he had told Kathur. But he had slept a dreamsmoke doze with the sweet smell of
ymeth
in his lungs and her hands and mouth upon his body, and at the instant he spoke the words it had not been two hours but much less than one. And from the striking of the clock he had no time at all. Those chimes had signalled the end of the Hour of the Cat.

And the start of the Hour of the Fox.

Kathur’s head drooped over the discarded
telek
and tears coursed down her cheeks, falling onto the weapon’s polished maple stock where they humped on the lustrous wood like pearls of great price. She stared at their trans-lucence as if she had never seen a tear before. Not such tears as these. She did not know why she wept, unless it was in fear. The cry of the distant harbor gong rang mournfully in her ears—a one-note song of warning— and Kathur knew she had good cause to be afraid.

Hautheisart
Voord was not known for his tolerance towards those who had failed him. And as if her thoughts had power to summon demons, she heard soft feet in the corridor outside.

Kathur looked up, saw the flitting of shadows beyond the door and reached out with one hand for the robe of crimson satin which was now such an inadequate covering. She was wrapped in the flimsy garment as best she could contrive when the first
taulath
drifted like smoke into her room. In the space of a single intake of breath another had joined him: both clad from head to heel in a close-fitting charcoal gray that was almost black and which blended most unnaturally into the shadows near the wall.