Battledragon (8 page)

And they brought to him cripples and the mad and he held them and the power went out from him into them and they were cured and they stood up and they spoke like sane men and the crowd went wild and the drums thundered and the ululations cracked against the skies.

And they brought to him the condemned and they wept and wailed and they were bowed down with chains. And they were hung up on poles beside the Prophet, who preached against their crimes. He damned their treachery, their apostasy, and their heresy in denying Him, "He Who Must." Then he raised his hands and once more they were silent.

And the condemned began to howl as their bodies distorted. Their cries rose into shrieks of agony as their ribs rose and muscles stretched taut. Then the distended chests finally burst in a shower of blood, with the sound of meat under the ax, and their hearts were given up to the Prophet's hands.

The crowd went mad with excitement, the drums rose to a thunderous pitch. The Prophet waited until they were exhausted, and then he raised his arms and hushed them. He blessed them and departed, disappearing behind a dark screen that cut off the brilliant glow of the orbs at the base of the pinnacle.

Far away on the Bone mere came another enormous flash of light and shortly thereafter a final heavy thud that reverberated in the warm, wet air.

The bell atop the temple rang for the second hour of morning. Apart from a few lights showing around the fish market and in the taverns hard by it, the city was asleep.

At the gate to the Dragon House, the sentries were nodding on their spears. Light snow was falling, and the skies were dark with hurrying clouds.

Suddenly there came a loud crash from the direction of the rubbish yard, next to the stables across the way from the Dragon House.

The sentries woke up, blinked in irritation, and peered across the cobbled passage to the dark mouth of the rubbish yard, a small court in which the garbage from the Tower of Guard and the Dragon House was mixed with other refuse from other official buildings before being mulched and transported.

They looked at each other and shrugged.

Suddenly there came another crash.

They looked at each other again.

"Come on, Gerse, we better take a look."

"You go. I should stay here."

"Both go, just in case. Might be a lunatic."

They peered through the snow.

"Come on."

Cautiously they made their way across the passage to the entrance to the rubbish yard. Gerse had brought a torch, which he thrust in ahead of himself. The other, Irodle, came behind him with his spear leveled.

The torchlight revealed mounds of debris, all carefully graded and tidied away. Two enormous cats glared at them from the dark, then sidled swiftly away behind the bone bins.

"Just them cats," said Gerse.

"I dunno," said Irodle, "it was pretty loud for cats."

But the piles of discarded clothing, dirty hay, vegetable compost, and builders' scrap stood there mutely in rebuttal.

"No lunatic," said Gerse with relief.

"Damn cats."

But it was not the cats who were solely intent on the rats drawn to the place. Nor was it a lunatic.

Neither Gerse nor Irodle glimpsed the tall, massive form that had slipped out of the Dragon House while they were in the rubbish yard.

It moved through the snow with a light, anxious tread, and turned out onto the wide space of Tower Parade, which led down the hill on the south side of the height on which stood the Tower of Guard.

Here Bazil Broketail paused for a moment. He was out of sight of the guards. Their job was primarily to keep people out of the Dragon House rather than dragons in, since wyverns only rarely entered the city, apart from the fortress set about the Tower of Guard. Still, he didn't want anyone to know about this mission, because he was about to break a most fundamental rule for the Dragon Corps.

From here on questions would certainly be raised about his conduct. But his determination remained. The damned old Purple Green was going to eat a fish and enjoy it. He'd been listening to the wild dragon go on about how distasteful fish was for months, and he was tired of it. So were all the others. It was up to Bazil to do something about it.

He set off southward, down Water Street, a steep lane that wound down through the Lamontan Graveyards to Sawmill Lane and then to Old East Street, where it changed pace. Now it dogged southeast and went straight down a smooth, gentle slope toward the East Bay. Here stood the homes of prosperous merchants, sea captains, and the like, in a fine row of white-fronted houses, each with a square portico held up by plastered pillars.

In the day a thousand eyes scrutinized this street, but at this hour there was no one to observe the progress of a two-ton wyvern dragon, partly concealed beneath his great cloak, as he hurried down the center of the street.

At the dockside he paused. On this side of Chandler's Point lay the East Bay. Here the water was shallow and just offshore the current was swift. There were shoals in the bay so it was not favored for shipping, which congregated on the west side of the point, inside True Bay.

Bazil crossed the promenade of the Southside and passed through the ornamental gardens to the ramps that led down to the sandy flats that fringed the water. Among the wealthier families, a ride on the exposed sands was one of the pleasures of the day.

The tide was low, and so he would have to cross a hundred yards or more of tidal flats. This wouldn't have been a problem except that across the bay he saw a fire on the beach, near the East Gate, where someone, perhaps drovers waiting for the morning's market, were staying warm and passing around a bottle of whiskey.

He removed his cloak, folded it roughly, and stuffed it beneath a bench. Then he dropped to all fours and slithered down across the cold wet sand to the water of the Long Sound.

He reached the meridian between two worlds and breathed deeply of the scent of the ocean. He pressed on, his feet slipping through the foam, feeling the delightful coolness of it as it splashed above his ankles.

This was seawater, and thus it was forbidden. Men feared that wyverns could not withstand the lure of the sea and that, once affected, they would leave and never return. Bazil had swum in the sea as a youngster, however, breaking the prohibition many times, and although he knew the pull of the sea he did not desire it above all things. And in his service in the legions, he had swum both lakes and rivers. Of course, freshwater was not the same; it had no echo in the heart for wyvern dragons, who were natural predators of the shore and the shallows.

The water came up to his belly, and then he was off his feet and swimming. It was cold, which he enjoyed. As a wyvern dragon, he burned at a higher temperature than men. He slid into it gratefully and inhaled the scent of ocean.

All at once a great orchestra struck a chord in the back of his mind, and he felt as he had never felt before. He swam in the natural way for wyverns, breathing several times quickly to fill his lungs and then keeping his head below the surface as his great tail thrust him along, with steering provided by his legs and torso.

Memories awoke from his youngest days in Blue Stone. Days when he had chased tuna over the offshore banks. Deep feelings moved inside him like whales working in the depths, inchoate things, never voiced before.

This was how to live, wild and free, swimming in the sea, the way the wild one had been when his wings were strong and he roamed the northern skies, pouncing on whatever he saw that he desired to eat. This was where a wyvern dragon belonged, where he ruled the shallow waters and the beach lands.

He surfaced to breathe, sucking down long deep breaths and expelling them loudly, supercharging his lungs. Then he lowered his head into the water, enjoying the feel of it, tasting ocean and her silky vastness, her distant shores and enormous reaches. He swam, sampling the water, seeking the trace odors of potential prey.

He noticed at once that there was a considerable stench coming from the True Bay on the other side of the headland. Marneri treated most of its sewage, but from the ships that docked and occasional spills from storm sewers, enough pollution reached the small, tight True Bay to make it stink to a nose as sensitive as his. He turned away from it and swam eastward, against the current, into clean water, keeping about half a mile from the land.

He sensed a school of mackerel ahead of him that took fright and fled out of the bay into deeper water. The sardines that the mackerel had been pursuing escaped down the coast inshore of him, and he chuckled to himself and wished the small fish well.

He crossed the Sequile shoals and detected a big eight-arms, intent on a crab until the wyvern was quite close. The octopus sensed him when he was right overhead and fled in a jet of black ink. Bazil lifted his head from the water and laughed from the sheer pleasure of it. This was the life, ruling the margin of the sea.

Why should he ever go back?

The question rose suddenly into his mind. Why return at all? Let them forget Bazil Broketail, he would become what he was meant to be, a great predator of the coasts, hunting for seals and bears on land and for whatever he could catch in the water. He would swim the surf from one end of the continent to the other and feast on the fish and the animals. No man would rule him, no one would make him wear man's things, the clothing and equipment that marked one as being the property of the legions. It was a dangerous life being a battledragon, why should he die for man?

Men, destiny, flashing thoughts struck through him, visions of the legions and their organized life.

He refused the call of these visions. Instead he would go free. He would taste the life of a wild wyvern.

He recalled with shame the disastrous attempt he had made some years before to desert and go wild with the Purple Green and the boy, hunting in the forests of Tunina. They had discovered that in a world of speedy elk and deer, two great multiton predators were simply too slow to survive. But here, in the ocean, the wyvern came into his own.

A savage exultance filled him, intoxicating him with its euphoria. He drove himself forward through the waters, thrilling to the sensation of pressing aside the sea, the mighty sea. He rose to the surface and sucked in a giant breath of air and rolled over onto his back and continued to power along, but on the surface, looking up into the silvery night-born clouds. Snow was falling lightly, being whipped away over the water by an offshore wind.

Suddenly, with painful clarity he visualized Relkin's face. He thought of the pain the boy would feel on learning of his desertion. He thought of the others, the dragons in the 109th, his close friends.

They would forget him, said the new part of his mind. His destiny was to live wild and swim the sea.

He would not forget them, said the older part of him, and he would live with shame that would grow and grow and consume his heart in the end.

After all they'd been through, he couldn't abandon Relkin. And then he thought of their dream, to retire after their ten-year stint and take up the free land in Kenor. They'd have savings to buy a few draft animals and plenty of tools, and they'd clear good land and build a prosperous farm. In time he would fertilize the eggs and beget more wyverns for the villages of the Argonath. He would live a productive life and a comfortable one.

The new part of him shouted its rejection of this human scheme. It demanded that he turn away from the land forever. Forget the men and their wars, none of it meant anything to a wyvern dragon hunting free along the shore.

Except that there was a good reason the dragons served the legions, and for a moment a dark cloud obscured his thought; from the cloud projected the fangs and hateful malice of the great enemy. And then it was gone, for the new part of him refused to accept it. He would turn away from all of that.

He swam on, thoughts quite blank, sometimes lying on his back and other times on his belly with his head down and his nose questing for the scent of prey. Slowly an unease spread through his euphoria, clouding it as effectively as the eight-arms' cloud of ink in the sea. All around him in the sea he felt this change, a wave of concern; creatures everywhere were dispersing away.

And then he caught another odor, darker, heavier than that of most fish, a stench filled with terror. Instantly it brought back memories of a night when he was young and played truant from the village and swam in Blue Stone Bay.

A great stern fish swam nearby, not the common kind mat grew to ten feet and five hundred pounds, but the very rare, terrifying giants known as white death, which could reach fifty feet and thirty tons.

The unease he had felt had hardened into something considerably less pleasant

On that occasion in his youth, he had been saved only by his good fortune in reaching the Bareback rocks a few seconds ahead of the monster that had pursued him. He had stood there shivering as the huge dorsal fin curved past the rocks and then sank into deeper water and vanished.

It was a rare moment that a wyvern dragon felt fear of another animal. Bazil recalled the feeling of awe and rage when he'd stared into the face of an ogre at the Battle of Sprian's Ridge. The ogre stood fifteen feet high and weighed as much as Bazil or more, but there'd been no fear, no genuine terror, for in his hands Bazil had held the great sword Ecator, nine feet of shining steel and fit to cut down any living thing. There had never been a sword to match Ecator, and he loved the weapon more than any other brute thing in the world. Only now he had no great sword in his hand, but merely a tail sword, with its short blade and sharp point, perfectly sufficient for dispatching a sternfish, but not what he would have chosen for this situation. Nor was he standing on firm ground, sword ready, connected to all his training and experience in war. Instead he floated in the watery universe and had to depend on his instincts.

He submerged and tried to locate the great fish. Nothing could be seen. The stench was stronger, and he sensed that the monster was near and mat it knew he was there. It was contemplating him. He was larger than most sea animals, and though it ate anything it came up with, including sick whales, it had the caution of its kind when there was no blood in the water. The presence of large quantities of blood drove all squalae into a frenzy, even leviathan, but in this situation it would carefully inspect a potential prey of Bazil's size.