The Dragon Lord (39 page)

“Dewan said
that
?”

“He told me to tell you that the old bear is getting far too old; and blind and deaf and stupid, because he should have been half wise enough to ignore the
no
when what he really heard was
yes
.”

“Kyrin-ain, I say yes as well. And I always will.” When he put his arms—those killer’s arms—around her and held her close, it was like a dream. There was the scent of her hair, the cool smoothness of her skin, the warmth of her lips and the simple nearness of her being there— but unlike so many other dreams there was not the bitterness of waking. “Lady,” he whispered—
O my lady, O my love
—”I missed you far more than I ever knew till now. I prayed you would come back, somehow, some day. And death strike down the first man who comes between us again…” He kissed her again, gently and then fiercely, hungrily—and she was as gentle, fierce and hungry and they were both trembling in each other’s arms, for it had been too long, too long, six months that had been a lifetime apart.

And a fist hammered on the door, making them both jump and shattering the moment. “Get yourself armored up and neat, dear
hanalth
, sir,” came Voord’s voice, edged with a sneer scarcely blunted by the thick timbers through which it passed. “We leave in ten minutes for the Tower!”

Silence. Then: “Who was that?” It was Kyrin’s question, but when she glanced at Aldric’s face she knew that she needed neither a name nor indeed an answer. Because for just an instant she had caught a glittering of pure hate in his eyes such as she had seldom seen before.

“Death strike the first man who comes between us,” he repeated. “If Hell or Heaven hears my prayers and curses, I hope that one is answered.” Then he took a step away from Kyrin and shrugged out of the military rank-robe, flinging it across the bed in a businesslike, no-nonsense manner which could never be confused with stripping for more pleasant purposes. “Did you understand him?”

“I don’t speak Drusalan.”

“Damn… What he said was
hurry up
. None too politely, either, burn his snake’s skin black. Anyway—” he jerked with his chin at the racked armor near the wall as he tugged off his own, too-Alban outer clothing, “Could you, please?”

Kyrin hesitated just a second, still confused, then began scooping metal and leather officer’s-pattern harness from the frame beside the window where she had come in. There was no sign even now that the shutters had been disturbed; but then Tehal Kyrin’s talent for subtle burglary had never really left her. When coupled with a lithe, slim build and a natural gymnastic ability, hunger made an excellent trainer of thieves.

“What are you doing tonight that’s suddenly so important?” she wanted to know, kneeling beside him to tighten the buckles of armored leggings with long fingers which had a distracting tendency to wander. Those fingers told her that despite his outward air of calm, Aldric was thrumming inside like a full-drawn bow. Part of it had to do with her, but the rest… It wasn’t fear, not even the flash of anger which she had caught from the corner of her eye. Just simple, plain excitement!

“I didn’t believe it when I heard at first; so you won’t either, most likely. But it seems that the princess…” Between grunts and oaths and struggles with intractable red-enamelled splint-armor, he managed to get out an edited version of the story. “But that apart, they can’t know what I intend.”

His voice was muffled by the scarlet arming-tunic he pulled over his head in mid-sentence, a heavy thing of quilted cloth and leather with thick padding at the shoulders where the hauberk’s weight would lie, and as his face emerged from its neck-opening—tangled with laces and nearly the tunic’s own color with exertion—there was an expression on it which told Kyrin that he had had an idea. No—an
idea
, dammit!

“Just for now, let’s forget most of what they don’t know and concentrate on one aspect—
push
—which even I hadn’t thought of until a few moments ago. God, that’s more comfortable!” He held out both arms so that she could buckle on the laminated defences running from knuckles to elbows and wiggled his fingers amiably at her to prove to them both that his hands could still move freely. “Because since you’re here,”—Kyrin looked up and arched a disdainful eyebrow—”this is what I want you to do.”

It was snowing again as they left the inn; dense white flakes from a dense gray sky falling vertically, steadily, heavily past that dark tower brooding over the city. Hooded and cloaked, gloved and booted, muffled as tightly against the weather as any of the others, Aldric still stopped short and unwrapped enough of his helmeted head to see the fortress better. Oh, he had seen it before in clearer air and better light, but never while walking towards its gate with the intention of going inside the belly of the beast. That knowledge put rather a different interpretation on what he saw.

It was huge, and sinister as a hungry animal. A great dark block of stone set down square in the middle of the city, eyed with lamps and fanged with the iron spikes that fringed its drop-gates, it was an evil building both by appearance and by reputation. As he drew closer, Aldric saw nothing that might alter such a judgment.

They were four armored men flanked and followed by eight more: an honor guard found by the squad of cavalry who had ridden with them. Black and scarlet, silver and gold, the soft swaddling of fabrics and the bright, hard glint of pigmented metal all stark against the fallen, falling snow. Few were on the streets to remark on their appearance, for the festival was running down, its momentum gone on this last night of holiday; it was somehow appropriate that this foul weather should have come to force the revellers indoors—there to talk, to reminisce, to drink and to become drunk against the sober thought of winter closing in.

Aldric was uneasy, made guarded and wary by what he knew and what remained undiscovered; his nerves were drawn to a fine pitch, tingling almost to the snapping point, and he was sensitive as never before toother sounds, reactions, feelings; emotion hidden well or ill. He could sense something about them all, and not merely because his mind had told him such sensations should be there. Bruda, Tagen, Voord. All of them. And they could probably feel just the same surrounding him. So long as they dismissed it as mere nervousness and nothing more! For under his rank-robe, pushed through his weapon-belt and out of sight but within quick reach of his right hand, was a
telek
. His own
telek
from his saddle holster, its drive-spring and action greased and checked, its rotary cylinder freshly loaded with eight lead-weighted steel darts. He carried it now in the certain knowledge that he would surely need the advantage given by this missile weapon.

Because he was equally aware that someone else’s cloak concealed the other one.

Hoofs beat for just a moment behind them, dull and muted in the snowfall silence, striking in the measured cadence of a slow walk. Not one horse: several. Then as suddenly the sound was gone. No one turned, for no one was so very interested. But Aldric, expecting to hear just such a sound, smiled quickly to himself within the shadows of the rank-flashed Imperial helmet and then composed his face again.

Bruda had not merely made encouraging noises about the power of his forged pass authorities: they worked. Presented at the Red Tower’s perimeter wall, they drew a clashing full salute from the sentries on guard within the shelter of the great gate-arch. It was acknowledged in the approved manner—Aldric half a watchful beat behind the others, to see what was done—with right arm snapped up to chest level, forearm horizontal and crooked in, palm downwards. And nothing more than that. He was—they all were—superior.

The soldiers both at the gate and those met with increasing frequency as they crossed the Red Tower’s grounds—pairs of men, Aldric observed, and always one of them with a crossbow slung at his back—gave them the respect of further salutes but showed no other interest. Visiting officers, staff, flag or line officers; they were all a common enough sight around the Tower, brought sometimes by curiosity while they were in the area, and sometimes on more businesslike errands. Whatever the reason, their presence was not worth noticing other than as something more needing a salute.

At last they reached the Red Tower’s gate, yawning to receive them, jagged above and below with the drop-and rising-shutters which gave it that look of unappeased hunger. Aldric stepped into the shelter of its lowering outerworks and threw back his hood, stamped a time or two to rid himself of loose snow and looked about him with a deliberate curiosity. He had decided that trying to hide such interest would appear more false than indulging it to the full, so he indulged.

For all that this place was known as a comfortable residence where noble guests could be invited to stay without fear of their leaving without permission, the first sight of the maw of its gate said
prison
in black-letter uncials too big for any mistakes. The famous red glaze did not continue beyond the outer cladding, except for the big six-sided tiles which paved the floor, and that gave Aldric, already far from comfortable with his private image of this building as a ravenous devourer, the unpleasant notion that he was standing on its tongue. The walls were built of gray stone, cut and dressed in massive blocks a score of tons apiece. Gray and huge. It was not the cold, but an errant uncalled-for memory which raised gooseflesh all over Aldric’s body. The memory was of a tomb which he had entered: an ancient tomb, made of such monstrous stones. The tomb of one who had been dead a long, long time. This place had the same feel to it—of things long dead and better left to sleep out the rest of eternity undisturbed. Breath drifted from his mouth and nose, and he realized that he had been holding it this few seconds past. For no reason other than his own imaginings. Or, maybe not.

He could hear Bruda’s voice in the background, but saying little of interest—only the conventional courtesies of rank to absent rank by way of a very junior non-com. “I convey by you respectful greeting to the noble commander, and desire that he permit us…” And so on. It certainly wasn’t enough to account for the low-intensity warnings sounding intermittently at the back of Aldric’s mind. But neither would they stop.

There was heat in his left hand and he knew that if he chanced to roll back the cuff of his glove, this whole place would be flooded by the blue-white glare of the Echainon stone. It was fully active now—through no desire on his part—with waves of heat that rose and fell with his pulsebeat and a sensation of contained force that he was certain the others could feel as well. Yet there was no sign of any such reaction. Either they couldn’t feel it—or they were hiding the fact that they could. Either way, what was going on?

The
eldheisart
presently commanding the Red Tower’s garrison was scarcely an imposing figure when at last he appeared, for all the neatness of his indoor-duty tunic. He looked more like a uniformed innkeeper than a soldier—fleshy around the waist and jowls, a man who enjoyed good food and drink—and Aldric wondered how much that might be due to the very special guest housed here.

Certainly there had been nothing in the least soft about the other troopers and officers whom he had seen; for all the relaxed and casual way in which they carried out their guard duties, they had struck him as a capable and dangerous group of men. More dangerous, indeed,
because
they were on duty here, rather than in spite of it. “A reward for good conduct” was how Bruda had described a posting to this garrison—which suggested that all the hard-eyed men inside and outside Egisburg’s Red Tower were here because they were better than their comrades. Better at the soldier’s trade of killing; for their look was not that of men whose superlatives lay in the gentler arts.

Then Aldric overheard something which made his heart start to race, but which at the same time had him forcing a sardonic smile off his face before it became too obvious. He had been standing a little off to one side while Bruda and the garrison commander made polite small talk over little glasses of some locally distilled spirit. It was as colorless as water, cold, heavy as oil and reeking of juniper, and most unusually where any alcohol was concerned, Aldric had found it vile. Mixed with something—anything!—yes, perhaps, but not neat. Unfortunately the others were swallowing both their small measures and the refills at a most affable rate and with every indication of enjoyment. That obvious disparity was making him look different and had most likely prompted the plump
eldheisart’s
remark; that, or the fact that by the look of him these hospitality-cups were far from being his first drink of the night. No matter.

What did matter was that Aldric heard him sniff through a red nose and then say quite plainly, “He seems a little, well, young for a
hanalth
. Don’t you think, Commander?”

That had made him nervous, but it was Voord’s equally audible reply which almost made him laugh out loud, for all the sincerity of its insulting tone. “That little bastard—your pardon, sir—doesn’t wear the thunderbolts right now, but he’s with
Kagh’ Ernvakh
all the same. And he’s here about Princess Marevna.” It was a spur-of-the-moment improvisation which was almost worthy of applause, because when it was recalled later in the light of events that Voord still thought were yet to come, the few words of that remark and the poorly hidden detestation in it would point yet another finger at the “murderer” of the princess.

Right now, however, it served the more immediate purpose of diverting the
eldheisart
from any continued interest in a guest who might have just turned into a venomous snake, if the portly officer’s reaction was anything to go by. And so far as Aldric was concerned, that was entirely to his liking.

The stairways inside the Red Tower were all wrong, for a fortress. They were far wider than they should have been and they didn’t spiral to inconvenience an attacker’s shield-arm. Surely even in the Drusalan Empire the basic practicalities of defensive architecture hadn’t been overlooked? Of course, all those years ago the purpose of the building had been changed; it had ceased to be a fortress and had become a residence for the Overlords of a notably wealthy city-state. Lords who would wish to flaunt that wealth with the construction and the decoration of broad, high halls, lofty windows and—
yes, all right
, Aldric conceded to himself—stairways that were both straight and five times wider than was proper.