The Dragon Lord (19 page)

“Ill-effects… ?” He too spoke in Alban, with something approaching relief after so long contending with Jouvaine and Drusalan. “None. None at all. So far. I’m fine. I suppose.”

“Excellent. My name is Garet—on
Hautheisart
Voord’s personal staff.” He hesitated, as if anticipating a reaction, but the name was only one among many to Aldric and meant nothing significant. “And I’ve been assigned to your care. So—food?”

Aldric shrugged. His mind was still having difficulty in assimilating the situation, for he was not being treated as he had expected a prisoner of the Empire might have been. Far from it—except in one respect. For it was only when he shrugged that he realized—with a nasty start barely concealed—that he was still bound at wrist and ankle. He had spent so much time lost in thought, staring at the ceiling and wandering through his mind rather than exploring the narrow confines of the cabin, that he had not noticed the bindings until now. Unlikely as it seemed with hindsight, it was not so surprising after all, for they were not ropes but soft wide bands of woven silk, far beyond his strength to break but secured with such care that their presence was not a constriction of his limbs. Just an unsettling inability to move.

“What about these things?” He lifted them: snug, almost comfortable wrappings that were as secure as any wrought-iron shackle—and stared pointedly over his crossed wrists at Garet, who at least had the good grace to look uncomfortable.

“Oh—I, ah, I don’t have authority to release you.”

Aldric made a small, faintly disgusted noise which managed to suggest he had expected no other response, and that seemed to embarrass the cadet still more.

“But—but I could ask the
kortagor-ka’-tulathin
on your behalf. He brought you aboard, so he might just…”

And that small kindness was not something Aldric had dared to expect at all. Where there’s life, he thought… and lay back on his bunk to watch the play of light across that too-close claustrophobic ceiling. But he didn’t dare to hope. Not yet.

The order to release him was not long in returning down the command chain from whoever authorised such things aboard this battleram; but it was an order wrapped in so many conditions as to negate its usefulness. Ultimately it was obeyed more in spirit than to the letter, as might have been expected about Drusalan orders.

His wrists and ankles were released, but he was not allowed on deck, and his left leg had been locked into an elaborate harness of steel and leather strips such as might be worn by one with a weakness in their muscles. Except that this was not meant as a support, but as a restriction; the hinging at its knee-joint was so tight that each stride was reduced to a rolling, stiff-legged hobble. He could walk, more or less, but his briefly entertained notion of pouncing on someone was reduced to no more than a wry joke. Aldric hadn’t tried the experiment yet; but someone, somewhere, had suspected that he might and he could recognise the signs of being outmaneu-vered yet again. The addition of a thumb-thick rope leash which secured him to a bulkhead was downright insulting.

Nevertheless, the food brought to him from the warship’s galley went a long way to compensate for injured dignity. No prison rations these: the various dishes were uniformly excellent and another pointer to instructions laid down for his continued well-being. There was a thin soup; charcoal-broiled fish which he guessed was not long out of the sea; meat and vegetables in a rich sauce of herbs and cream; and a sharp white wine—cooled by a water-jacket—with which to wash it down.

But like the over-elaborate security measures, the food’s very presentation was influenced not so much by himself as by his reputation—or rather, by whatever highly colored version of it had preceded him aboard. It had certainly lost nothing in the re-telling, for every piece of vegetable, meat or fish had been cut up in advance so that the only eating instrument he required— and was given—was a kind of wooden spoon with rounded, blunt fork-tines carved into it. The sort of thing given to very young children, so that they couldn’t possibly hurt themselves.

Or to supposedly lethal Alban
kailinin
, so that they couldn’t hurt anybody at all. The idea of a precaution lest he try to take over an Imperial battleram with his dinner service was so ridiculous that he sniggered himself into a fit of hiccups; although afterwards, as he ate, Aldric reflected ruefully that if he was less well known— or his reputation not so awesome—to whoever had arranged all this, then he might by now have had a chance to get away.
Off a ship in open ocean? Be reasonable
! Even so, it would have gained him a little more freedom. Notoriety might be flattering to some of the people he had met; he personally could do without it. And he won-dered if the officer cadre of the Drusalan Empire had ever heard of the concept of a gentleman’s parole.

The meal was good, and he was hungry. Those two facts led to empty dishes—and a stifled belch as Aldric lay back and composed himself for an after-dinner nap. It was not something in which he indulged given normal circumstances; but the thirty-odd pounds of strapping around his rigid, awkward leg was a constant reminder of abnormality. Besides which, he had eaten far too much.

Up on the command deck a sandglass was turned over and its turning was marked by a bell struck at the changing of the hour. Just after noon, thought Aldric drowsily: just after lunch. That makes it—the effort of thinking was such that he almost gave up—the Hour of the Hawk becoming, becoming… He yawned hugely and snuggled into the rolling, swaying, comforting embrace of the bunk as sleep overwhelmed him.

Becoming, he might have finished, the Hour of the Dragon.

It seemed that he had barely closed his eyes before they snapped open again, and he was jerked from an uncomfortable slumber by a sound that he had heard before: the clangor of an Imperial warship’s alarm gongs sounding battle-stations. For just the first few seconds it was as if his strange, troubled dream had carried over to the waking world; then reality in the form of clattering footsteps outside and overhead gave the lie to such a notion. There was another clattering, harsher and more metallic, and the cabin’s interior went abruptly dark as armored screens dropped over the two small, thick-glassed ports. Aldric found himself in twilight, his only illumination the wan trickle of daylight which filtered through shrouded weapon-slits in each screen.

It was no longer a dream—it was a nightmare, that same recurring nightmare of helplessness. Once more he was aboard
En Sohra;
once more the First Fleet flagship
Aalkhorst
was shearing down on him with white water boiling from her prow; once more he could only hope that she would turn aside.

And she did. The bunk beneath him heeled abruptly from the horizontal, its angle so steep that he all but tumbled off. A rushing of water filled his ears and the feeble light beyond the screened ports turned green and then black as the battleram in which he was an unwilling passenger executed a vicious evasive snap-turn. Aldric knew what was happening: he had seen such a maneuver before, from the outside—it
had
been the
Aalkhorst
that time—and he knew too that as the warship turned, part of her hull submerged under the sideways pressures of having her helm put hard over at speed. But Lord God! He hadn’t known that such a turn could be so bloody
steep
!

Twice more the vessel lunged, and twice more Aldric dug his fingernails into the planking and tried to avoid being flung helplessly to the deck. Already there was blood on his face and a ragged gash at his hairline, as mementos of violent contact with one of the bulkhead uprights.

Then suddenly, between one rolling turn and the next, the watery light outside flushed a rich, rosy amber. Just for ah instant: slower than the brilliant flicker of a lightning-flash, but much much faster than the blue-white skimmed-milk glow of a break in clouds crossing the moon. And the warship stopped.

Not dead in the water—there was too much momentum in her great bulk for that—but she lost way, ceased to be a vessel cutting through the ocean and became instead no more than a mere decelerating hulk. And Aldric could smell burning.

There was a dreadful stillness as if everyone aboard— officers, crewmen, marines, and even the ship herself— drew in a great breath and held it in expectation of something monstrous about to happen.

Aldric’s barely-relaxed fingers tightened again as the battleram heeled—then clamped more convulsively still when the angle changed and he realized she hadn’t heeled at all. She had
tipped
, her stern rearing out of the water as her beaked prow plunged down. He had never, ever watched a ship sink, much less had one go down beneath him, but he had heard it described and knew well enough what it was supposed to feel like. Like
this
!

The cabin door slammed open and outlined by its frame—indeed, clinging to its frame as Aldric clung to his bunk—was the young officer-cadet Garet. No longer friendly and no longer concerned—except perhaps for his own safety. Even—impossible though it seemed—no longer as young. Yet in the shadows of his close-fitting helmet his boy’s face still seemed no more than sixteen, blanched white as bone with shock, or fear, or disbelief— as white as the knuckles of the hands which gripped the uprights of the cabin door.

“You!” He gasped the word, Drusalan now and guttural-harsh as only that language could achieve. “You—get on deck! Now!
Move!”

Aldric stared at him and as if the officer’s fear played counterpoint to his own emotions, felt the unknowing fear of the past minutes fade and freeze over until they were sheathed in an icy armor that was all dignity and pride and honor-born courage. Which was not the same as true courage at all, and Aldric knew that even if no one else did. But they appeared the same and that was enough. He slapped the brace on his leg with an irritable, careless gesture, as a man might swat at an insect he can’t quite reach.

“I go nowhere with this. Remove it.
Now
.” And he spoke the words with studied malevolence in the highest mode of the Drusalan language that he knew, quite aware that the insult of implied superiority was a killing matter. Usually. “Well?”

Garet stared at him, gaped at him for half-a-dozen heartbeats—and then ripped the dress dagger that was one of his marks of rank out of its scabbard. Aldric thought that at last he had miscalculated, pushed a little too far, at last had overstepped the mark—thought that this would be a killing matter at any time, in any place.

The dagger point paused, glittering nastily in the cabin’s subdued light, the silvery striations of honing on its cutting edges sparkling at him as the weapon trembled in an unsteady grip.

“I should gut you for that,
hlensyarl”
Garet whis-pered. “And maybe I will. But not just yet. I have my orders. Later…” He sucked in a deep breath, trying to regain a degree of self-control. “But… but you’re going nowhere unless I have your Word. Your parole. You do understand ‘parole,’ Alban, don’t you?”

It seemed that he, too, knew how to use language for subtle insult.

Aldric hesitated. Even though he had already considered such a possibility, and would have welcomed it half an hour ago, things had changed. The warship seemed under attack—
seemed
, he reminded himself—and he might well have a chance to escape during any confusion which might arise. But not if he was bound by an intangible thing that was harder for him to break than the shackle on his leg.

His mind began to hurt with the swirling rush of variables: without his given Word, the brace would not be removed; without its removal, his chance to escape was nil; with his Word given and the brace removed, he could not escape anyway. But locked up down here, with iron about his leg, the only certainty would be of drowning if the battleram rolled over and began to sink.

“All right. All right… ! I swear. On my Honor and on my Word, I do swear that I will not endeavour to escape or yet take flight without permission granted by those who hold me captive.”

The cadet watched him coldly, his expression easy to read framed as it was within the rank-barred helmet.
Tau-kortagor
Garet was wondering, and not troubling to hide his doubts, if the Alban’s oath was worth more than the exhaled air which carried it. Aldric returned the stare with interest, and that interest was hatred.

“
So-ka, Drus’ach arluth’n
. My parole is given. Satisfied?”

The edge on Aldric’s voice was as sharp as that on the knife still aimed at his throat and slowly, slowly Garet nodded. Just once. “I am content.”

“Then,” Aldric gestured with one hand, “take this bloody thing
off
!”

The restraint fell away to the oak-planked deck with a clatter that was very loud in the silence which had settled on the warship, and as the bands of steel and bullhide released their grip on his thigh Aldric felt the agonising tingle of blood as it poured back into vessels which had been constricted for far too long. He stretched the limb and flexed it, again and again; from hip to ankle it felt as if each muscle had been dipped in boiling brine, and despite Garet’s ill-concealed impatience it was only when the leg felt and worked more as it should that Aldric nodded curtly and agreed to do as he was bid.

The inner belly of the battleram was much as he imagined a rabbit-warren might look to a rabbit: a maze of passages which branched off from one another, each low-ceilinged and constricted, each leading somewhere that was unknown to a stranger. He followed the
tau-kortagor’s
disapproving back along walkways, through heavy doors edged with greased leather that was obviously meant to keep water at bay—and always, always upward.

The Imperial warship was truly a huge vessel; doubtless she was not so monstrous as she seemed to him right now, but before God and the Holy Light of Heaven she had no right to be so big and so powerful and so armored and still defy the sea by floating on it.

Daylight through a hatchway hit him like a blow in the face and he flinched from it, shielding his outraged eyes with one arm. It was only the impact of the light from outside that brought home to Aldric just how dim it was on the lower decks where he had been confined. And he knew why, too: no lanterns. They had all been stowed away in case of fire.