Servant of the Dragon (18 page)

* * *

Cashel watched the world spin about him, wondering when the business would be over. He was standing still. He
knew
that, as surely as he knew his own name. Everything around him changed in a series of eyeblinks.

His friends rotated and vanished. A blue haze congealed, then vanished like dew in the sunshine. Cashel stood at the base of the same bluff as before, but the vegetation twisted along the ground and had a maroon tinge. Shallow water that was choked with bluish algae stood where the street had been. A pair of eyes looked up from the water's surface, but the thing's body remained a vast dark mass which the algae mottled.

Everything shifted again. The water swung vertical; the bluff behind Cashel was a flat plain for the instant before a hard, ruby glare encompassed him and everything vanished.

Cashel was under the pale green sea. A fish faced him, hanging in place with quivering motions of its pectoral fins. The pressure of forty feet of water squeezed Cashel and started to lift him.

He twisted, wondering if he'd drown before he reached the surface. The bluff behind him was covered with sponges and soft corals whose fans waved in the current.

A red light enveloped Cashel again. He breathed hot, dry air and his staff was firmly planted on stony soil. His skin and clothes were sopping, and he could taste salt water on his lips.

Three figures goggled at him. They looked like toads standing on their hind legs, their broad lipless mouths gaping white. They wore copper bangles around their wrists, ankles, and the thickening beneath their heads that would have been the neck in a human being. The toads carried no tools or weapons, but one had a whisk of something that might have a beast's tail, grass, or even some fibrous mineral.

The blue glare wrapped Cashel, then opened to release him. He stood in a forest glade, beneath the same rocky hillside as in every other scene. This time he stumbled and thrust out his staff to catch himself.

In the side of the bluff was a thirty-foot gateway framed by pillars of pinkish-gray granite like no stone Cashel had seen in Valles. He looked up. From his steep angle he couldn't be sure about the scene on the triangular pediment above him, but it looked like a montage of men and demons battling or perhaps just torturing one another. The figures were sculpted from the same dense stone; the job must have been almost as difficult as carving crystal on the same scale.

The door in the gateway was bronze and stood ajar. Its surface was chased with writing in the sweeping letters that Cashel knew to call the Old Script. He couldn't read himself and could barely write his name in modern letters, but he'd seen the script often enough in the recent past. It was the form which wizards used to write their spells before they spoke them.

Cashel took a deep breath. The woods around him looked ordinary, though he hadn't been in this particular place before. There were oaks, beeches, and hickories; where the light was good enough, hornbeams formed a lower story. The air had the heavy natural smell of decay, the scent of late summer when growth has stopped and the leaves of dogwoods and sweetgums have already begun to turn.

Cashel spun his staff, using one hand and then both. He was loosening his muscles and making sure everything—his body as well as the hickory—was in balance.

A squirrel chattered above him. Cashel let the staff swish to a halt and called back with his tongue against the roof of his mouth. Startled, the squirrel fell silent.

Cashel pursed his lips and looked around him. It was nice to be out of the city again, though he preferred meadow to woodland. If your sheep got into the woods, they usually got in trouble. Of course, they got in trouble in open meadows too—if there was a sillier animal than a sheep, Cashel hadn't met it—but in open country you could get to them easier before they managed to drown or hang themselves in the crotch of a sapling.

He grinned. He knew about sheep, but he couldn't say he missed being around them all the time since he'd left the borough.

Cashel figured he was where Tenoctris meant him to come, but he didn't see any sign of Landure. The open bronze door was one way he could go, and there were three trails through the forest converging here.

The cave breathed out the way caves do when the open air is cooler than that in their depths. The forest wasn't
that
cool, Cashel would have thought, and he didn't like the sulphur tinge from below.

His nose wrinkled. He guessed he'd try one of the trails.

At least this was a better place to be than any of the ones he'd flashed through in coming here. The toadmen hadn't looked unfriendly, exactly, but the sea would've been a real problem for somebody who didn't swim any better than Cashel did. Though he guessed he'd have managed.

He started up the trail that led through a bed of galax for no reason beyond his needing to pick one path or another. He hadn't taken the second step when a woman with a hand over her bleeding thigh came running toward him past a stand of yellow birches.

She saw Cashel the same time he saw her. "Help please!" she cried desperately. "He means to kill me!"

She was about as pretty as any woman Cashel had ever met. Her hair was black and long, but she wore it in twin braids bound on top of her head like a turban. Her skin was white except for her lips, and the nails of her fingers and bare toes must have been painted with something to give them such a metallic red color.

The wound can't have been too bad, though it had soaked the lower right side of the linen tunic that was all the clothes the woman wore. If it'd been deep enough to get the artery, she'd have been dead as quick as if her throat was slit, and she ran too well for any big muscles to be cut.

Cashel dropped his staff crossways in front of him. "Keep back of me," he said, his voice suddenly husky. He didn't know what was going on, but this wasn't something he was going to walk away from. Finding Landure and then Sharina could wait a bit.

The woman gave him a grateful look and obediently swung herself behind Cashel's solid form. He hoped she'd know to keep
well
back, because a seven-foot quarterstaff takes up a lot of room when it's being used for serious work. He couldn't waste time worrying about her now, though; a man with a long bloody sword in his hand came through the birches in pursuit.

"Hello there!" Cashel said, his legs braced and his hands spread about the center point of the staff, ready to spin or strike. "What is it you plan to do here?"

The man stopped. His expression changed from momentary amazement to mottled fury. He was a tall fellow with a full black beard and shoulder-length hair. He wore a headband of red leather with symbols drawn on it in gold, and some sort red apron over his tunic, also embroidered in gold. On the middle finger of the man's left hand was a ring with a purple-black stone, nearly opaque but larger than a walnut.

The man looked Cashel over. "Don't meddle in matters that are none of your business, boy," he said. His words seemed to echo from the open gateway behind Cashel.

He pointed his left index finger toward the cowering woman. "Get down there, Colva," he ordered, "or I'll treat you as you deserve!"

"If you take another step with that sword...," Cashel said. He had to force the words; his anger was like a mouthful of pebbles, choking him. "Then you'll make it my business."

"May the Lady preserve me from fools!" the man snapped. He closed his left fist and held it toward Cashel as though the big ring was a buckler for protection. "Strike him down!" he said.

A bubble of red light swelled from the sapphire like sap dripping from a wounded pine. It grew to the size of a brood sow, flame-shot and still expanding to fill the distance between Cashel and the stranger who thrust it at him.

Cashel stabbed with his quarterstaff, leading with his right hand. The blow was intinctive. The ferrule met the bubble with a blue flash that jolted him as though he'd slammed his staff into a boulder.

The bubble vanished. The wizard—no doubt about that now—flew over on his back, even though he'd been a good ten feet from the quarterstaff when Cashel struck.

"Bad idea, master!" cried a piping voice Cashel couldn't identify. "A really bad idea! Get down on your knees and beg,
that's
what you need to do now!"

The wizard paid as little attention to the disembodied voice as Cashel himself did. He got to his feet with the smooth, slow care of a man who's letting caution temper his obvious rage. "Will you, do you think?" he said to Cashel in a hoarse voice. "By the Lady, you will not!"

He stepped forward and cut overhand at Cashel. Cashel brought the staff around again, left ferrule leading this time, and caught the sword in mid-stroke.

The blade rang on the iron butt cap. The wizard kept his grip on the humming weapon, but the shock spun him face-down on the ground.

"Not used to fighting people who fight back, are you?" Cashel growled in a voice he wouldn't have recognized as his own if he'd had leisure to think about it. "Go on about your business, fellow. And I
don't
mean your business with this lady!"

The wizard rose again, watching Cashel with an expression of cold anger. His eyes were as black as chips of jet.

He began circling to his right. He'd lost his headband the second time he hit the ground, so his hair hung in loose strands across his face. He brushed it away with his left hand; the swordpoint quivered in narrow circles in line with Cashel's heart.

Cashel turned easily with his opponent; the woman kept behind him. She'd torn off the hem of her tunic and was binding it over the slash in her thigh as she moved.

The wizard was a strong man to be able to keep his sword up the way he did, but he hadn't done a lot of fighting. The blade gleamed with a high polish. It'd rung like steel when Cashel struck it aside, but the sheen of the metal was more like silver or even glass.

The high voice jeered, "He's right, you know, master. You're always pushing people around, telling them to do this, do that. And now it's time for you to—"

"Shut up!" the wizard said in a voice like thunder.

"Oh, sure," chirped the disembodied voice. "You're my master, so I'll shut up. But you're not his, that's for—"

The wizard slid his booted right foot forward on the loam, extending his right arm and sword in a long lunge. Cashel's quarterstaff stabbed, the right hand guiding the hickory and the left ramming the shaft straight out like a battering ram.

The staff was twice the length of the wizard's blade. The ferrule caught him on the bridge of the nose, smashing his skull and flinging his body back into the doorway in the bluff. Cashel felt the shock all the way up his left arm. He stepped back, wheezing from the tension of the fight.

"You killed him," the woman said. She stepped past Cashel with a serpentine grace despite her wound. Her fingertips brushed the bunched muscles of his left arm, as gently as a breeze.

"Keep away!" Cashel said. "He may not be...."

But the wizard really was dead. Cashel knew that as surely as he knew the sun rose in the morning.

"I didn't mean to kill him," Cashel muttered. "I don't even know who he was."

The woman knelt beside the body. Cashel thought she was holding the corpse's left hand, but when she turned to face Cashel again he saw that she'd covered the ring with a wad of soft dirt.

"He was a monster of the pit," she said, rising supplely to her feet. "He escaped while my husband Landure was absent for a few days. I tried to force him back into the Underworld, but he was too strong for me. If you hadn't arrived, stranger, he would certainly have killed me—or taken me down with him to a worse fate."

She bent and deliberately wiped the dirt from her hands on the dead man's rich apron. Her eyes, large and honey-colored, were fixed on Cashel.

"The ring is a demon," she explained as she straightened. "It speaks, and it's almost as dangerous as the demon-lord who wore it."

Her tongue licked her lips. "My name is Colva," she added.

Cashel cleared his throat. "I'm Cashel or-Kenset," he said. He was having a hard time collecting his thoughts. "My friend, that is, the wizard Tenoctris sent me here to find your husband. I, ah, I'm looking for my friend Sharina. Lady Sharina."

Colva smiled at him. "The Gods must have sent you to me," she said. "Don't you think so, Cashel?"

The sound of her voice made him feel like he was being licked by a cat's tongue, warm and tickling and sticky as well. It made it hard to think.

"I don't know about the Gods," Cashel said. "I—can you direct me to Master Landure?"

"Come," said Colva, putting her right hand in his left and leading him up the path by which she'd first appeared. "I'll take you to our mansion, where you can wait for my husband Landure to return. It'll only be a few days."

Cashel glanced over his shoulder. "How about the, the dead man?" he said.

Colva looked up into his eyes. "Let him stay where he lies," she said. "He'll be a warning to others of his sort who might want to come up to plague the waking world."

She tugged Cashel's hand. Beneath the soft, pale skin, Colva had the muscles of a cat. "Come," she repeated.

Hand in hand, she and Cashel went up the path. No birds or squirrels chittered in the leaves; the woodland had gone silent. Colva began to sing, but the tune was in a minor key and Cashel couldn't make out the words.