The Dragon of Despair (66 page)

Firekeeper growled and stepped from the tub, shaking water everywhere as if she had forgotten there were such things as towels.

“I not want him to die,” she protested. “I go find him and Peace. I owe Peace, too, for not being traitor.”

“We aren’t giving up on them,” Derian said. “Edlin didn’t send the map because he figured our cause was hopeless. We just need to regroup.”

He spoke bravely, but he didn’t know if he believed his own words. So much depended on who had taken Peace and Edlin, and for whom they were working. From what Elise and Edlin had learned at the embassy, not all the New Kelvinese supported Melina. Was this Idalia, Peace’s sister, on Melina’s side or against her?

“Xarxius,” he said aloud.

“Xarxius?” Elise echoed, looking at him as if he’d gone insane.

“Xarxius,” Derian repeated. “Peace told us that he and Xarxius had worked together. I got the feeling they’d been more than business associates, that they’d been friends. Maybe Xarxius could help us.”

Mingled hope and worry showed on his companions’ faces.

“We could contact him through Ambassador Redbriar,” Elise offered somewhat hesitantly. “His post is as liaison with foreign interests. Contact between them must be fairly regular.”

“I like it,” Firekeeper said decisively. “It is something. Otherwise I must go under the earth again, and without Peace and Edlin—I try to see traps, but I may not.”

“Before we run off to Ambassador Redbriar,” Doc said, “we should give time for Edlin—and Peace—to be returned to us.”

“Returned?” Firekeeper looked at him with undisguised confusion. “I tell you, Doc. This Idalia woman take them. She very angry. I not think she let them go.”

“Maybe so, maybe not,” Doc said, unshaken by the disbelief in the wolf-woman’s dark eyes. “Haven’t you ever caught something bigger than you planned?”

Firekeeper looked about to deny it, but Derian saw her gaze flicker to Blind Seer. The wolf, his fur spiky from his bath, was looking at her, his mouth gaping in what even unenlightened humans recognized as a canine laugh.

“Once,” she said. “Twice. What does that matter?”

Wendee, who had been toweling off her charge, now handed Firekeeper undergarments in a pointed if silent command.

“I think,” Wendee said, when Firekeeper began dressing, “that what Doc means is that this Idalia may find that capturing Lord Edlin Kestrel, heir to that duchy, has more ramifications than she had originally thought. You said she recognized him.”

“She said he was idiot and that she’d heard of him,” Firekeeper corrected.

“Interesting,” Wendee said. “That may mean she had heard more of Edlin’s peculiarities than of his position. Don’t make faces at me! I’m not talking in riddles. From how Peace talked about his family, this Idalia is of the same general social class as Derian or myself. She is not involved in trade—at least Peace never mentioned any of his family in that line.

“That means that Idalia, unlike her brother, unlike Lady Archer, has had no reason to learn the details of our culture and government. To her the relative importance of a ‘lord’—especially since it’s a title used for many low ranking nobles, even those with no inheritance prospects…”

“Like Lady Melina,” Firekeeper said, nodding her understanding as she slipped into her vest and twisted the toggles shut, “or Lady Blysse.”

“Right,” Wendee said, taking out a comb. “Now, this Idalia may not realize that she has caught herself not just any lord but a lord heir—and that idiot or not, Edlin is not to be lightly disposed of.”

Derian felt hope for the first time since Firekeeper’s return home.

“And Edlin should be taken even less lightly than any other lord heir. His grandmother’s lands are directly across the White Water. She controls one of the major trade crossings.”

“Xarxius’s purview again,” said Elise with a wry grin. “Even if for no other reason, he should be involved because of that.”

“But I wonder,” Firekeeper said, dressed now and strapping her Fang to its accustomed place at her side, “whose side is Xarxius on?”

And no one, of course, had an answer for that.

TO TORIOVICO IT SEEMED
as if the entirety of Thendulla Lypella must know what he had learned in his readings the day before. From the moment he awoke and called for his body servant to fetch his dressing gown he felt aware of a suppressed tension in the air.

He knew it was his imagination. No one could have read what he had and, of course, no one could read his own notes. The excitement and trepidation he sensed were his own, no other’s.

Thankfully, Melina was not beside him this morning. She had dined with him and gone to bed with him, but in the dark hours of the night he had awakened to an awareness of her departing his side. When he had called after her, she had said that something she had eaten must have disagreed with her, that she would return when she felt better or else rest in her own suite.

Torio had thought he had glimpsed Tipi and wondered if some message the maid had brought was the cause of Melina’s going, but he had not pursued the matter. Indeed, he was glad to have Melina gone from him.

The evening meal had been a nightmare. He had feared Melina would see his new knowledge in his eyes, but she had not, perhaps too distracted by her own thoughts—perhaps believing him so lulled by her powers that she need but give him some small attention.

Still clad only in his dressing gown, hurrying lest Melina return, Toriovico penned a brief note to Columi requesting another private meeting. He knew he was taking a risk accepting the Lapidary into his confidence, but he also knew that someone other than himself must share his knowledge. Sharing was both danger—for Columi might betray him—and insurance, for should something happen to him Columi would know enough to act.

This was not an idle dread. Toriovico realized that Melina had gulled him once, even as she still held many of his key counselors in thrall. He had been fortunate that her intense interest in her new discoveries had distracted her from him, fortunate, too, that his dancing had provided its own charm. One or the other might not have been enough to break her hold. Together, both had succeeded.

Lest someone note a difference in his manner, Toriovico forced himself to hold to his usual routine. He ate heartily, though his tongue scarcely tasted the food. He attended several meetings and spoke the ceremonial words required of him with so much intensity that several of the other participants looked at him rather strangely. Though his ears could hardly hear the music for the pounding of his heart, he went to his morning practice and danced the part of the Harvest Lord.

Only after lunch did he excuse himself and head for the museum.

When Torio arrived, Columi was waiting and whisked him away to the private office at the core of his tower.

“There was an urgency to your note, Healed One,” he said. “Have you discovered something?”

Toriovico found his tongue resisted talking about any of the secrets from the book, but he forced himself on by reminding himself that the knowledge was available from other sources—hadn’t Melina learned it?

At least he thought she had….

“I think I have,” he said slowly, “but nothing of what I tell you must go beyond we two unless…”

He swallowed hard.

“Unless you have reason to believe that I have taken leave of either my senses or my life.”

Columi looked at him with an understanding that was worse than the disbelief Toriovico had inwardly feared.

“Tell me, Honored One.”

“It begins,” Toriovico said, “in the earliest days of the Founders. They came here from the Old Country and settled more land than is commonly known—all the way from the shores where Waterland now holds sway to these mountain fastnesses.

“Eventually, others came and wanted that land for themselves. There were terrible battles and—I am ashamed to say—our ancestors lost. Yet they did not lose entirely. They forfeited the coastal lands, but they held the mountains—and made a new one.”

Columi cleared his throat.

“That was in the days of the wizard Kelvin,” he commented almost diffidently. “As the tale is told within our sodality, the mountain range that now bears the name Sword of Kelvin was raised at the end of those wars. Our lore relates how the Founders made the unquiet rock come to life and raised a barrier between the remnants of our people and the invaders.”

Toriovico’s lips curved in the smallest of smiles.

“That is a tale not often told these days,” he said, “for the First Healed One felt that accounts of heroism rather than defeat would keep our kingdom strong after the Burning Times. It is interesting that your sodality still tells it.”

“We study rock and how it lives and grows,” said the emeritus with a slight shrug. “The tale must stay alive or be rediscovered in some version by every bright young Lapidary. And I notice you do not tell it as if it was new knowledge, so it was not completely lost.”

“No,” Toriovico said, aware of how many secrets he still kept. “Much of the Healed One’s education is in tales and legends that otherwise might be lost.”

“How true,” Columi said, and there seemed to be a double meaning in his inflection.

Toriovico wondered just what the old man might have learned or guessed in his long life, but decided that this was not the time to ask.

“Tell me,” Columi went on, “what this raising of a mountain hundreds of years ago has to do with the actions of a foreign-born sorceress today?”

“Since you know stones,” Torio acceded, “you must also know the legends that dragons are creatures of the elements, some say children of the elements.”

“I have heard these tales,” Columi admitted, “but never in all my delvings beneath the earth, even in volcanoes where I have seen the pumping of the earth’s own blood, have I seen a dragon. I have been to the crests of the Eversnow Mountains where the stone blends with ice and the wind screams its secret name and there, too, I have never glimpsed even the claw print of a dragon.”

“I am sure that the hero Kelvin felt as you do,” Toriovico said, “for if he believed the tales, I doubt he would have done what he did. You see, it seems that when Kelvin raised the Sword Mountains, he also raised a dragon.”

Columi leaned forward, his eyes glittering, but he made no sound.

“Some sources insist that Kelvin created the dragon,” Torio went on, “with the power he channeled through that unquiet rock. Some say he merely summoned it. Others that the dragon was there already, nascent, a spirit of the place without a body—that the magic gave it a body.

“Whatever the truth—and personally I favor the last—a dragon surged into being even as the mountains rose. At first our people cheered and laughed for they saw the monster as a new weapon to turn against the invaders. Indeed, so the Waterlanders saw it as well, for they fled and not even their deep and abiding greed has made them attempt to claim as much as an inch of the foothills.

“Yet this was not the case. The dragon seemed to know from where had come the power that had raised it and, rather than being pleased, it was filled with fury. It descended on the sorcerers. Several died. Among these was Kelvin himself, dying, not beneath an onslaught of enemy magic as our tales now tell, but from the result of a magic he himself had caused to be summoned.”

Now Columi could be silent no longer.

“I wonder that we have no tales of this!” he exclaimed. “Surely hundreds if not thousands saw the dragon and witnessed these battles.”

“But we do,” Toriovico replied with a sad smile. “Every child knows the story of the Star Wizard and the Dragon of Despair. It is part of the same tale, separated from its beginning because it holds no shame.”

“Truly?”

“Truly,” Toriovico assured him. “The Star Wizard was the first among those sorcerers that the hero Kelvin marshaled in order to raise the Sword Mountains. He was a more powerful wizard than Kelvin, but not as great a warrior. Circumstances forced him to become one. The Star Wizard’s circle of allies lay broken and bleeding. Kelvin was dead. The city—not yet named Dragon’s Breath—was burning from the monster’s fire.

“The Star Wizard used a magical mirror, so the tales say, one that magnified the light of the sun until it became a solid beam. Wielding that light as a sword, he drove the Dragon of Despair into the caverns beneath Thendulla Lypella. Then he dissolved it once again into the elements, so successfully that its energy fed the latent volcanic activity.

“Some say that the dragon attempted its revenge once or twice, seeking to store its power and release it all in a rush, but the Star Wizard and those who became his apprentices quieted it until it merely sulked and steamed. Eventually, its consciousness faded and it slept.

“Other tales relate how rival wizards sought to awaken the dragon, promising it freedom in return for its power in their fights. The Star Wizard balked them, for the spells by which he had bound the monster were so potent that only the most horrible magical rites would set it free. And so the Dragon of Despair was bound and so it remains bound to this day.”

Columi had been listening, nodding almost like a child listening to a familiar tale. Now, as Toriovico stopped speaking and poured himself a cup from the pitcher that rested between them, the old man’s smile faded.