Song of the Dragon Read online

  “Forgive me, Keeper,” Soen said carefully. “I serve at your pleasure.”

  “Yes, you do,” Ch’drei said, her tone still sharp. “And you will continue to do so. Having been so adamant, I hesitate to tell you that I have indeed arranged passage with the Occuran through their Imperial Trade Folds as you requested. You have been granted an Imperial Charge that cannot be questioned and that leaves you free to pursue your target at any price—any price, you understand.”

  “Yes, my Keeper.”

  Ch’drei nodded with satisfaction. “Very well, Soen. How do you intend to proceed?”

  “I must leave at once, Keeper,” Soen said. “I’ll follow the Trade Folds into occupied Chaenandria and then the old Northmarch Folds as far as Yurani Keep. Then I’ll make my way southwest, to pick up their track once more. My Matei remains aligned to the traitor’s beacon stones. It is only a matter of time after that.”

  The Keeper raised her brow over her glossy black eyes. “Time before what?”

  “Before I track down this Drakis and find out who he really is.” Soen said. “If he’s worth your time, Ch’drei, then I’ll bring him back to you as a gift.”

  Ch’drei smiled. She could imagine Soen thinking and rethinking this plan each day for the last three weeks. “Bring this Drakis back to us and we’ll see if he is of any use. I am counting on your skill and your discretion. No one may know of this, you understand. I am sending you out alone and with no Quorum in support. This is against the laws of our Order, but under the circumstances I think it best you be left to act on your own.”

  “Wisdom indeed,” Soen said with a smile. “For if I am discovered . . .”

  “I will deny that this conversation ever took place,” Ch’drei nodded. “I believe we are both clear on this subject?”

  “Yes, Keeper,” Soen nodded. “When may I leave?

  “Within the hour,” Ch’drei said. “You are expected at the Trade Folds of the Occuran before noon.”

  “Thank you. I shall bring honor to your name, Ch’drei,” Soen said with a slight bow and a wry smile.

  “I have every confidence in you, Soen,” Ch’drei smiled in return.

  The Keeper watched her Inquisitor as he backed a few steps from her and then turned, his strides carrying him across the floor back to the still open doors. He stopped and, flashing a sharp-toothed grin, pulled the doors closed as he bowed out of the room.

  Ch’drei sat for a moment, waiting for the deep silence to once again permeate the room. She always thought of the silence as a physical thing that she both welcomed and respected. She reveled in it for a while longer until she was certain that it would not be disturbed by Soen again.

  “You understand what you have heard?” Ch’drei whispered into the silence.

  The silence whispered back. “Yes, Lady Ch’drei.”

  “And your Quorums? Are its members in place?”

  “Yes, Lady Ch’drei,” came the hushed response, barely echoing between the columns supporting the low ceiling overhead. “They are arranged among the Trade Portals as you requested. Everything lies in wait.”

  “And none of the Quorum members know your mission,” the Keeper said, stressing each of the words as she spoke. “It is absolutely vital that you alone know your true mission—that you alone complete it.”

  “They know only that we serve the Iblisi,” the voice replied. “They will obey me without question.”

  The Keeper allowed herself a sad smile. “He must never suspect you are tracking him—never have the notion so much as enter his head. If he so much as hears you breathing, you will be of no use to me.”

  “Yes, Lady Ch’drei.”

  The Keeper stood up from her throne and carefully descended the three steps to the floor of her audience hall. “Tell it to me once again . . . let me hear it in your own words. What is your first task?”

  “Track the Inquisitor Soen wherever he may go. Leave no trace of our passage. Follow him to a human slave named Drakis—the Drakis who bolted from House Timuran in the Western Provinces.”

  “That is right,” the Keeper purred. “What is your second task?”

  “When we are assured of his identity, we are to capture this Drakis alive and kill any who may have associated with him. I am then to deliver this Drakis to you personally here in this room.”

  “That is right,” Ch’drei said . . . and then, holding up her hand, she paused.

  The Keeper had thought this through again and again since that day at Togrun Fel, tried to find a different course to take; but her first thought as she had sat on this same throne inside a tomb half a continent away remained her only answer.

  Soen was right; this Drakis could easily be mistaken for the bringer of doom to the Rhonas Empire—especially because he was a weapon of untold destruction. The fall of the Empire was coming as Ch’drei, Soen, and a number of other Inquisitors were well aware. Soen wanted to control that fall and emerge victorious from the rubble with the Iblisi to rule.

  Ch’drei shared that vision, but she also knew that such power was not something easily held in common with anyone—especially an Inquisitor with boundless ambition. Sooner or later, one of them—Ch’drei or Soen—would have to go.

  Better sooner than later, Ch’drei sighed to herself. And better Soen than her.

  “And finally?” Ch’drei spoke at last to the darkness.

  “And then we are to track and kill Inquisitor Soen,” the voice said, a rasping sound now apparent in its speech.

  So it had been said, and having been said was now the will of the Keeper. Killing Soen would not be easy, she mused. For that she had needed someone who was personally motivated and committed to the Inquisitor’s death.

  Ch’drei smiled as she turned. From the shadows at the side of the hall, a robed figure emerged. It drew its hood back, revealing a face that would have caused even elven adults to blanch. A flap of damaged skin sagged down over the elf’s right eye, which was now a dreadful and useless milky-gray in color. The skin of his face bore long scars and discoloration from slashing burns that ran up his long forehead to the elongated crown, but one particularly terrible scar pulled badly at the left corner of his mouth, lifting the lip on that side into an unnatural and perpetual snarl.

  Ch’drei sighed at the sight of him. “I delayed as long as I dared. I had hoped that the healers of the Occuran could have done more for you, but there is no more time left to us. Are you ready, my son? Can you do this thing that the Order demands of you?”

  “To follow Soen to this human, rob him of his glory, and then kill him?” the misshapen elf asked. After a slight pause, the figure fell to his knees. “Yes. Oh, yes, I can with the greatest of pleasure, Lady Ch’drei.”

  The Keeper laid her long, bony hand atop the burn-scared forehead of the elf kneeling before her. “Then go with the blessings of the gods and the Will of the Emperor, Inquisitor Jukung.”

  Jukung raised his face toward her, his effort at a grateful smile contorting his features into a grim mask.

  Book 3:

  THE FORGOTTEN

  CHAPTER 31

  Fool’s Errand

  THE DWARF STOOD on an outcropping of rock, surveying his own mind as much as the landscape spread before him.

  There were two obvious paths in the morning light. One lay northward into the broad, unknowable expanse of the Vestasian Savanna that ran to a flat and hazy horizon. The other path led eastward up into the foothill foundations that formed the western end of the Aerian Mountains. He could see the peaks in the distance now outlined in the slowly warming twilight of the dawn.

  Northward with Drakis . . . eastward with his heart.

  In truth, back into the roots of the mountain had been his original—if somewhat desperate—plan. When the Last Throne had fallen, he was trapped with the Heart of Aer, both of them hidden in the midst of the Rhonas Army occupying the caverns surrounding them on all sides. It was only a matter of time before the entirely too predictable elves would come with t
heir gleaners and discover him and his treasure. Then Drakis had come—a gift from the forge of the gods—and the confused human became the means of Jugar’s escape.

  That his “escape” involved placing himself into slavery was, he chuckled to himself, the very foundation of its brilliance. House Timuran was obviously just another of uncounted self-important and equally insignificant Imperial Houses of the Third Estate aspiring to grandeur in the grandeur-ridden Rhonas Imperium. A more important House—or perhaps one closer to the actual power of the Empire—might have recognized the Heart of Aer for what it truly was, and then Jugar would have been a fool indeed. But a backwater House of the Western Provinces . . . no, that was a place that would not recognize what they had until he had used its power against them, caused their hearts to be torn still beating from their chests, and freed himself and his prize.

  That this human idiot heard the Song of the Northern Legends in his mind made it all the easier.

  And it had all worked out so much better than he had planned. Jugar congratulated himself again on how well he had manipulated this Drakis fellow to the point where his distraction had allowed the dwarf to recover the Heart of Aer—and do all the damage that he had hoped to achieve. That Drakis and his companions had brought him north through the infernal elven folds had been a wonderful and happy accident that he had managed to steer toward Togrun Fel—his intended destination all along. The westward bend in their course across Hyperia had been necessitated by the Rhonas armies that remained encamped at the Southern Gates.

  But then things began to go wrong. The Hecariat had been a close thing, and then, try as he might, he could not influence Drakis—who had grown unreasonably stubborn—to turn them back north toward the mountains. Somehow that madwoman Lyric had put that nonsense about Murialis in his head. Even then he might have managed to persuade Drakis to turn north toward the end of the mountains, but his back luck turned to worse. The Iblisi Inquisitor and his Quorum had shown up at the most inopportune moment and forced them all into the lands of the dreadful Murialis faery queen.

  But the dice of the gods had not stopped rolling, and even that apparent disaster had turned to his advantage. Murialis had bought into the Drakis legend—no wonder faeries are so fond of tales—and had not only spared their lives but had managed to whisk them through her kingdom and deposit them all at its northernmost boundaries almost exactly at the spot where—in his wildest dwarven dreams—he had hoped to come.

  “So, you’re leaving us?”

  Jugar actually started at the voice behind him. He slipped the black, cold crystal stone back into his pocket. “Eh? Oh, Drakis!”

  “My apologies,” Drakis said, his own gaze fixed on the mountains in the distant east. “Still, I’d be sorry to see you go.”

  “Go?” The dwarf turned and smiled charmingly. “No, friend Drakis—I was but looking on the ancestral mountains of the lost dwarves. Just a fool lost in thought.”

  “Not so lost, I think,” Drakis replied. “I’ve been doing some thinking of my own. Just before the last battle—before we met—Braun told me . . .”

  “Who?” Jugar asked.

  “Braun,” Drakis answered with some annoyance. “Our Proxi . . . you don’t know him. Anyway, he pointed out that there were no young nor old among the dwarven dead.”

  “Indeed?”

  “Yes, indeed,” Drakis continued. “So, I think they must have gone somewhere, Jugar. There must be dwarves somewhere—and a great many of them, I wouldn’t doubt.”

  “This—Braun—friend of yours seems uncommonly clever,” Jugar sniffed.

  “My point is that you should go and find them,” Drakis said, nodding toward the mountains. “You’ve done enough for us.”

  “Nonsense!” Jugar laughed. “We’ve only just started down our road!”

  “My road, not yours,” Drakis said. “Why have you even come with us this far? I half expected you to leave us at Togrun Fel . . .”

  He nearly had, Jugar thought to himself.

  But now he wavered.

  Jugar gazed at the distant outline of the Aerian Range to the east and sighed with great satisfaction. He pulled the Heart of Aer from his pocket, fingering its cold facets as he tumbled it over and over with the fingers of his hand. There beneath the mountain, he thought, his people waited. There, deep in the dark roots and secret places farther below than elves or men ever suspected, his fellow dwarves waited for the return of the Heart of Aer and through it the healing of their race.

  But healing was not what Jugar had in mind.

  Vengeance, retribution, justice, pain—that is what filled his thoughts and schemes, along with the growing conviction in his soul that Drakis could be the means by which he could achieve all his dark and cold desires. Could Drakis be the real thing? If he was, then Drakis could be the means of spilling enough elven blood to satisfy even Jugar’s thirst for revenge.

  All he needed was for Jugar the Fool to guide his steps a little longer—and a little farther north.

  “Sometimes it’s a good idea to take a road you’ve never walked before and see where it leads, Drakis,” Jugar said through a gap-toothed smile. “I’d like to walk yours a bit longer and see where it takes me.”

  “Drakis?”

  The human warrior and the dwarf returned from the ridge to the small encampment. Ethis tended a cheery fire that was somehow almost entirely devoid of smoke. Jugar moved quickly to the flames, warming his hands. Drakis would have joined him, but the Lyric rushed up to him before he could take another step.

  The pale face of the Lyric was staring at him. “Drakis, it is long past time you returned. There is a journey before us, and you are our guide.”

  Drakis took the Lyric’s offered hand. “Thank you . . . and you are?”

  The Lyric flashed a bright, roguish smile. Her emerging hair was almost white in its lightness, a fuzzy nimbus framing her pinched face. “You are still confused from the journey. You will remember me as Felicia of the Mists.”

  “Yes,” Drakis nodded, trying to remember just who the Lyric last thought herself to be. “The . . . uh . . . Princess of the Isles.”

  “Princess of the Erebusian Isles,” the Lyric corrected with a light laugh. “Fear not, good Drakis; we raiders of the Nordesian Coast are far more forgiving than our frightening legends make us out to be. When we reach the coast, our cousins who sail the Bay of Thetis will show you such hospitality that you will never again forget my true name!”

  “I shall look forward to it,” Drakis said, but his words seemed to fade toward the end as his eyes tried without success to take in the vista that lay just beyond the Lyric.

  The morning sun cast long shadows across a low, jagged terrain that gave way quickly to a seemingly infinite plain of grassland marred only occasionally by a grouping of solitary trees or the flash of water through the shimmering waves of the warming air. To his right, distant purple peaks rose above the line of dense trees that ran from the east behind him and continued to form a great arch that vanished into a hazy and indistinct horizon to the west. The sky itself seemed larger to him stretched over such a vastness so flat that he felt he might almost fall off of it.

  Ethis looked up, his face now the typical blankness that characterized most of the chimerian race. “Good morrow, Drakis.”

  Drakis ignored the chimerian. “Jugar, since you’re determined to be here with us . . . perhaps you could tell us just where are we?”

  “We are precisely where you asked that we should be,” the dwarf said brightly. “We are beyond the northern border of the cursed Hyperian Woodland and now stand on the verge of Vestasia itself! We have traveled just short of eighty leagues and seemingly overnight.”

  “That far?” Drakis asked. “How is that possible?”

  The dwarf looked up from the campfire and smiled. “My good Drakis, it is a miracle—nothing short of a miracle of the gods—that we have been brought here. Carried by the demons of Queen Murialis for reasons of her own and deposited as you
yourself requested here across the northern boundaries of her most terrible and feared kingdom ! I had hoped to skirt the western slopes of the Aerian Range and avoid any danger that her minions might present, and yet here we are and a week’s journey the richer for it! And fortunate—fortunate indeed—for all our possessions remain with us with not a piece of lint nor thread subtracted from the lot as one might expect from the faery folk! A week’s worth of travel in a single day—thanks to the capricious whim of the Faery Queen.”

  “Hardly capricious,” Ethis added, his eyes fixed on Drakis. “Drakis negotiated our passage for us. It seems Murialis is a reasonable monarch after all.”

  The human warrior eyed Ethis critically for a moment but decided not to let the comment escalate into an argument. Drakis had done nothing that brought them through the strange woods of Murialis except to let the Faery Queen believe that he might be this mythical fulfillment of some ancient prophecy that everyone seemed to know about except him. Ethis had been the one who had saved them, bringing them into the faery realm and insuring that they weren’t summarily killed. If Ethis had his reasons for letting the rest of the group think that Drakis had been the big hero, then an argument over who had actually saved them would have been foolish.

  They were in enough trouble without fighting among themselves over anything; so Drakis turned his mind to other things.

  Vestasia, Drakis thought. It felt different from the Hyperian Plain that they had crossed with such trepidation just the week before; though it had been deserted, Drakis felt it was a land where civilization had once flourished and could return again to tame the broad plain and cultivate its expanse. The overwhelming impression that the warrior had of the grass-and-rock choked flatlands before him was that it was entirely wild, forbidding and savage. It was a badlands with its own natural law that defied anyone from the outside who wished to impose any rule other than that of unstoppable, deadly nature.