The Dragon Revenant (25 page)

“I just can’t sleep any more, my lord. It’s being inside all the time like this. I’m going to go daft in here, truly I am.”

“Better daft than dead, lad. I’ve seen cases of consumption that seemed cured for weeks, only to flare up again as soon as the patient overdid it.”

Perryn sighed and flopped back against his pile of pillows to stare miserably at the ceiling.

“Er, ah, well, there’s somewhat I’ve been wondering, truly. Why are you working so hard to save me if I’m only going to hang? Or do I have to get well just so Cullyn of Cerrmor can cut me into pieces? I won’t have a chance in combat whether I’m well or ill, so he might as well do his slicing right now.”

“Oh come now, don’t be morbid!”

“Morbid, is it? You’re the one who had me caught and locked up in here.”

“Well, so I did. But the more I study you, the more I’m sure you’re not a criminal—at least as far as Jill’s concerned. On the other hand, you really should have known better when it came to all those horses. Stealing is wrong.”

“That’s what Jill always said, too.” Perryn looked utterly confused. “But um, well, er, she never could explain why.”

“Indeed? Well, there’s lots of reasons, but consider this one, lad. When you steal a horse from someone, you may be taking away a thing they may truly need someday.”

“But I only took them from lords who had lots.”

“Just so, but how do you know what the future and their Wyrd might bring them? The day might come when the horse you took would be the last left to them, and they might die in battle from its lack, and that death might set off some vast and subtle chain of events beyond anyone’s control. Now I admit, this all must sound very farfetched, but you never know. That’s the crux of it: you never know.”

Perryn looked profoundly unconvinced.

“Well, then, here’s an example that should lie close to your heart. Consider Jill and Rhodry. When you took her away, you didn’t even know that Rhodry was Aberwyn’s heir, did you? If he hadn’t been following you and Jill all over the wretched Cerrgonney wilderness, his enemies would have had a hard time kidnapping him. Come to think of it, Jill might have been able to stop them. She has dweomer, so the Wildfolk would have warned her, or she would have felt danger on her own. In either case she could have called for help—from me, or Salamander, or simply from your uncle or another local lord.”

Perryn sat straight up in bed, and his face turned pale.

“My lord, I hear the guards talking. They say there could be a war because Rhodry’s gone.”

“They’re quite right.”

“But the noble-born fight on horseback in this part of the kingdom. If there’s a war, horses are going to be killed in droves.”

“And men, too, I might add.”

Perryn seemed deaf to Nevyn’s qualification. He was staring off into space, and his eyes were filled with tears.

“All those horses,” he whispered. “Ah ye gods, I’m sorry!”

“Are you? Then I suggest you think about what I’ve said.”

It was well after the noon meal that Elaeno came back from his trip to the guildhall. Nevyn had just returned Rhodda to the women’s hall after their daily walk when Elaeno met him on the stairs. The Bardekian’s face was grim indeed.

“We’ve got to talk privately.”

“You’ve got news, do you?”

“Of a sort. Very much of a sort.”

They went into Nevyn’s tower room, and although Nevyn settled himself in the cushioned chair in the window, Elaeno paced restlessly round and round as he talked.

“A man who was calling himself Alyantano and claiming to come from Orystinna passed through Aberwyn and the guild a couple of months ago. By asking a lot of questions I finally figured out who he really is. Now he’s never been associated with the dark dweomer in any true sense, but he’s as rotten as a beached hull nonetheless. He comes from the city of Naralion, his real name is Lerranno, and he’s known as the Butcher of Vulture Pass.”

“A lovely tide, sure enough. How did he get it?”

“Well, he was an officer in command of a couple of regiments on what should have been a routine exercise—oh about a year ago now, I think it was. Since I only heard the general gossip, I’m not sure of all the details. The upshot, though, was that he ordered a hundred citizen recruits across a rope bridge after he’d been warned it was unsafe. The bridge pulled free, the men all died, and he was—let me see, you don’t quite have the words for these terms in Deverry, but he was tried in a special kind of malover by other army officers and found guilty of all sorts of criminal charges. Although some of the judges pressed for death, he ended up being exiled.”

“And he’s here now?”

“He is, and when he arrived in Aberwyn, he had an awful lot of hard coin for an exile. I’m wondering if someone gave it to him, like, to do a bit of work for them. He’s in a certain Lord Darryl’s service at the moment.”

“Not Darryl of Trenrydd?”

“The very one.”

“What does he want an exiled Bardekian general for?”

“Well, a couple of the men down at the guild seemed to think he was planning on forming an army of common-born pikemen if things came to war. It would make sense.”

“So it would, but an ugly thing it would be. I wonder if that kind of army would be more or less effective against the usual warband?”

Elaeno shrugged and turned both hands palm-upward.

“A rhetorical question only, my friend,” Nevyn said, grinning. “I don’t know much more about warfare than you do. I’ll have a word with Cullyn, I think.”

When Nevyn put the question to him, the captain had a ready answer.

“Oh, the pikemen would be effective enough if they were properly disciplined. Now I’ve never been in Bardek myself, my lord, but from what I’ve heard, their spearmen drill for months before they ever see a battlefield. They carry these big curved shields, shaped like the side of a leather bottle, you see, longer than they’re wide, and they march in tight formation, so they make a kind of wall across the battlefield. Now, as long as they hold their position, it’s going to be cursed hard for a cavalry charge to break them, and that’s where the drill comes in. Your average Deverry townsman’s going to turn and run when the horses start coming, but not your Bardek professional.”

“I see. What about when the javelins start flying?”

“I’ve heard about that, too. They don’t use the war darts in Bardek, but they do have archers and sometimes slingers. So when the missiles come raining down, the men in the second row raise and tip their shields forward to cover part of themselves and the lads in the front, and so on all the way back in the formation. That way the shield wall’s still solid, and as long as the men have the strength to hold their cover up, well, now, it’s a fair hard line to break. They call it making a turtle.”

“Ah. I suppose elven archers would stand a good chance against them, though.”

“I doubt that, my lord. I doubt that very much, even with their longbows.”

The dweomer-warning rippled down Nevyn’s back like a shower of snow. It startled him so much that he missed Cullyn’s next remark completely and had to apologize.

“What was that again?”

“I was just saying that if you want to use pikemen you’ve got to give them good equipment. Cheap shields made of raw hides won’t turn steel blades. I wonder if Darryl of Trenrydd has the coin or the craftsmen to outfit enough Bardek-style pikemen to make any kind of difference.”

“I don’t know. I have the wretched feeling, though, that he intends us to find out if Rhodry doesn’t get home soon.”

“Just so.” Cullyn’s eyes turned oddly blank, as if he were bored with the subject, but Nevyn knew him well enough to know that he was covering some deep feeling. “I don’t suppose there’s been any news from Bardek.”

“I’m afraid not. Even the dweomer has its limits, my friend, and we won’t be hearing from Bardek till the spring. I only pray that Jill and Rhodry are unharmed.”

“So do I. All the time, my lord, all the time.”

After he left the captain, Nevyn considered that odd warning that had come to him—out of nowhere, he would have said, except for one small thing: dweomer-warnings never come out of a simple nowhere. Since they’d been talking of the elves and elven warfare at that precise moment, Nevyn could be fairly certain that the warning related to the affairs of that alien race. Precisely how was beyond him, but then, the Wyrd of the Elcyion Lacar lay out of his province. That very night he contacted his old pupil, Aderyn, through the fire and handed the problem over to him.

“I’m not certain of its meaning.” Aderyn’s image was grim as it floated above the flames. “But I have an idea. I’m coming to Eldidd.”

“Well and good, then. When will you arrive?”

“Not for weeks, I’m afraid. We’re a long way to the west at the moment, but I’ll leave with the morrow dawn.”

For several weeks the Great Krysello, King of the Cryptic, and his Mind-Boggling Brace of Bizarre Barbarians had traveled along the northeast coast of Surtinna, giving single shows in the villages and staying for a couple of nights in the towns, until at last they reached the city of-Pardidion, lying on a narrow strip of plain between the ocean and the mountains. Since it was one of the richest merchant states on the east side of the island, they had a splendid run of three nights in the marketplace as well as a performance at a private party given by the archon himself.

“But all splendors must fade, and all suns sink in the west, alas and more’s the pity,” Salamander said. “I think we’ve played the fool enough for now. It’s time to turn our faces toward the beauteous Pastedion.”

“Cursed well about time if you ask me,” Jill snapped. “How do we get there?”

“There’s a caravan road, actually, which is why we came here in the first place. Colonists from Pardidion settled Pastedion, you see, some years back, and they trade all the time. There are some smaller towns along the road, too, which should come in handy for the sheltering of wizards.”

As soon as the city gates opened that morning, they rode out, heading roughly northwest toward the town of Albara. Since she’d gotten used to the irrigated lowlands, the Bardekian foothills came as a real surprise to Jill. Although they were covered with wild grasses, they were dead-brown, so dry and bleached that at times in strong sunlight it seemed as if they rode through hills of beaten gold. In the coombs, where there was ground water all year long, grew holm oaks, their leathery leaves a green so dark that they looked like black bubbles caught in the golden dales. In some of the canyons and gulches, a thick choking tangle of shrubs and spiky things of all kinds spilled down to the flat road below, but the rest of the terrain was utterly treeless. It was hot there, too, a dry and breathless heat that set the roads to shimmering and danced on the huge sandstone boulders that poked up through the thin soil.

They stopped for the noon meal in a tiny valley, where a trickle of water, just clean enough for the horses, ran down the middle of a rocky stream bed. The humans drank watered wine from a skin bought back in Pardidion.

“I think we’d better skip the usual nap,” Salamander remarked. “I can’t shake the feeling that someone’s following us.”

“Nor more can I,” Jill said. “And I don’t want them to catch us out here with no one else around.”

“Truly. Well, we’ll be safe in Albara. If we’re very lucky, we might even And one last caravan heading north and join up with it, but I doubt it. It’s too close to the flood season now, hard though it is to believe at this moment.”

“Are there any silver daggers in the islands?” Jill said. “I mean, the same sort of man, someone you can hire for a bodyguard.”

“None that I’ve ever heard of, alas and alack. We might have to … Wait! Silver dagger. Why do those words tug at my mind … ye gods, I almost forgot the wretched ring!”

“The what?”

“A silver ring, a present for you, younger brother, from our most esteemed father.” Salamander took out the leather pouch he kept hidden inside his tunic and dumped a handful of small coins and lint into his lap. “Here we are.”

He handed Rhodry a flat silver band, about a third of an inch wide, engraved with some design.

“Roses.” Rhodry held it up. “Now that’s a peculiar omen. What’s this inside?”

“Elven writing. If you sound the letters out, it says
‘arr-ssos-ah soth-ee lorr-ess-oh-ahz.’
As to what that may mean, no one knows, not elven loremaster nor dweomerwoman nor bard, and no more the human priests of Wmm, because I asked them myself and thus should know.”

With a shrug Rhodry slipped the ring on the third finger of his right hand: a perfect fit.

“Why are roses a peculiar omen?” Jill said.

“Well, my lady Alaena gave me a trinket. I wonder if I brought it along?” Rhodry picked up his saddlebags, which were lying beside him on the ground, and rummaged through until he found a silver pin in the shape of a single rose. “It’s dwarven silver, just like this ring and the silver daggers. It turned up in the Wylinth marketplace.”

“Stranger and stranger,” Salamander said. “They could have been made by the same hand, or at least the same workshop. Anyway, a long time ago a mysterious stranger gave our father that ring and said it was for one of his sons. Assorted divinations have awarded it to you. I was trying to find you to hand it over when you got yourself abducted.”

Rhodry was staring at the ring in utter bewilderment.

“Do we have other brothers?” he said at last.

“One, a full-blooded elf, he is, and then we have a sister who’s fully elven, and it’s too bad she’s our kin, because she’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, well, present company excepted of course.”

“No need to flatter,” Jill said, smiling. “I’d never pretend that I could ever be as lovely as an elven woman.”

“You’re certainly as lovely as most, but they all envy our Mellario. And you, younger brother, had three brothers on your mother’s side of the family. Two are dead for certain, alas, and the third, your elder, has most probably ridden through the gates of the Otherlands by now, because when last I heard, he’d suffered a very bad fall from his horse. If I remember correctly, the poor beast rolled on him, too.”