The Rite (4 page)

Malazan spat a tongue of yellow flame, but not at Sammaster.

“What do you want me to do?” the dragon growled.

19 Mirtul, the Year of Rogue Dragons

The sailors cried out at the sight of the dot sweeping through the blue sky above the northern shore. Taegan Nightwind, whose avariel eyes were sharper than a human’s, made haste to reassure his companions: It’s a metallic dragon. Brass, I think.”

“What’s the difference?” said Phylas, he of the shaggy hair and surly disposition, and Taegan had to admit he had a point. In such a grim time as the Rage, any wyrm, even a member of a species generally considered benign, could pose a danger.

The weather-beaten, almost toothless captain of the fishing vessel, however, chose to take the crewman to task.

“Swallow your tongue,” he said, which was evidently a Moonsea way of rebuking someone for speaking out of turn. “Not all dragons have turned wicked. Think of Kara.”

Despite his general distemper, Phylas had the grace to look abashed.

From what Taegan had gathered, Kara, Dorn Graybrook, Will Turnstone, Pavel Shemov, and Raryn Snowstealer had done Elmwood a considerable service by ridding it of a force of occupying Zhents. Accordingly, when the winged elf arrived in the village and explained that he was a friend of those very heroes, trying to catch up with them, the townsfolk had insisted on helping him cross the great freshwater lake called the Moonsea free of charge.

The brass dragon swooped down among the towers of Thentia and disappeared, without breathing fire or casting an attack spell, and without anyone ringing an alarm bell or shooting arrows at it. Presumably it was one of Kara’s rogues, carrying some new bit of information to the town’s community of wizards, those eccentric, fiercely independent arcanists who, by Pavel’s reckoning, constituted the best hope of unraveling the mysteries of the Rage before it was too late. The locals had likely grown accustomed to the wyrms coming and going.

His iridescent scales rippling with rainbows, silvery butterfly wings beating, Jivex flew across the deck. He too was a drake, a faerie dragon, though the members of his particular forest-dwelling species were tiny compared to their colossal kindred. From the tip of his snout to the end of his constantly flicking tail, Jivex was only as long as Taegan’s arm.

“You see,” Jivex said, jerking his head in the direction of the since vanished brass dragon, “that’s how creatures with wings are supposed to get around. We ought to try it sometime.”

The reptile had suffered a bout of seasickness during the first few hours of the voyage, and in consequence had evidently resolved to despise all boats forever after.

“I humbly beg your problem,” Taegan replied, for selecting this mode of transport. Silly me, I thought it might be imprudent to fly out over a large body of open water with no clear idea how far it was to the other shore, and nowhere to set down if our strength flagged.”

Jivex snorted. “Well, can we get off the boat now?”

Taegan realized that was a good idea. Why creep slowly on into port when their wings could carry them there in a fraction of the time?

He turned to the captain and said, “With your kind permission, I believe we will take our leave now.”

“It’s all right with us,” the sailor said. “The sooner we get back to netting fish, the better off we’ll be.”

“Well, then, Sune bless you all.”

Taegan leaped up from the deck, pounded his black-feathered wings to gain altitude, caught an updraft, and flew on over the purple-blue water. The sun warmed his outstretched pinions. Maybe spring truly had arrived, even in the chilly northern lands.

His wings a platinum blur, Jivex took up a position beside Taegan, close enough for the two to converse.

“What will Thentia be like?” asked the drake.

“I’ve never been there. All I know about the place is that it’s famous for its wizards.” Taegan’s fancy warmed to the idea. “So probably, the dogs and cats can talk, every woman saunters about cloaked in glamours to make her look as delectable as Lady Firehair herself, and the alchemists amuse themselves by turning all base metals into gold. Naturally, no one has to do any work. The mages have conjured demon slaves to perform every task, from chopping wood to swamping out the privies.”

“Do you really think the wizards can stop the Rage?”

Taegan realized from the unaccustomed plaintive note in his companion’s voice that Jivex was looking for reassurance. He must have suffered nightmares again the past night.

“I’m sure they can,” the avariel lied. “What one wizard can do, even if the mage in question is Sammaster, a whole coven of them can surely undo.”

They soared on over the docks and on into the center of Thentia. Peering down at the narrow, muddy streets and steeply pitched shingled rooftops, Taegan saw no wonders to betray the fact that the place was home to a plenitude of powerful mages. Thentia seemed a typical Moonsea town, a raw, rugged place that, for the most part, looked as if it had been knocked down and rebuilt so many times that the inhabitants had learned not to invest any time in creating ornate architecture or other civic amenities.

It did have a couple notable structures, though. One was a white marble temple whose stained glass windows bore the eyes-and-stars symbol of Selűne, goddess of the moon. Another was a tower painted in the most garish manner imaginable, with vertical streaks of red, yellow, and orange. The brass dragon had landed in the spire’s courtyard and crouched with its head and neck stuck through the principal entry. As Taegan and Jivex swooped lower, the wyrm flattened its wings against its back and crawled completely inside, passing through the high, wide double doors with scarcely an inch to spare.

Taegan landed and started to follow, with Jivex flitting along beside him. A burly doorman with battered ears and a broken nose, clad in livery of the same bright hues disfiguring the tower, started to block the way, then goggled as he took a better look at the newcomers.

“The avariel,” he said.

Taegan didn’t actually like being called an avariel. Years before, he’d thrown in his lot with the human race, which, in his view, had built a splendid civilization while his own timid, primitive folk hid from the rest of the world. But he supposed that in this situation, the important thing was that the servant had heard about the winged elf who’d acquired Sammaster’s folio.

“That’s correct,” he said, “I’m Maestro Taegan Nightwind.” Maestro of nothing, some might say, since the Cult of the Dragon burned his fencing academy to the ground, but entitled to the honorific of a master-of-arms nonetheless.

And I’m Jivex,” the faerie dragon declared, “Lord of the Gray Forest. Well, part of it. Sort of.”

“Kara said you might come,” the doorman said, “when you finished your work in Impiltur.”

“When we parted, I had no idea I’d do any such thing, so I can only marvel at her perspicacity,” Taegan said with a grin. “Is she here? Or Dorn, or Pavel?”

The big man shook his head. “No, none of them. They’ve all traveled to one godsforsaken place or another, looking for the information the wizards need.”

“Well, I suppose it doesn’t really matter. I actually came to join the search for knowledge. I simply need the wizards to assign me a task.”

“I’m sure Firefingers—Flammuldinath Thuldoum, my master—will be glad to oblige.”

Dorn had mentioned “Firefingers,” and Taegan suddenly understood the colors of the tower, and of the doorman’s livery. “Your employer painted his home to resemble a flame,” he said.

“Well, obviously,” said Jivex in a superior tone. “I saw that right away.”

The doorman tried to smother a smile. “I’ll show you in.”

At its base, the tower swelled into a ground floor the size of a villa. Once he entered, Taegan observed that much of the space constituted a single room, one Firefingers had evidently dedicated to the effort to end the Rage. The leaves from Sammaster’s folio lay scattered across several long tabletops, mingled with books, scrolls, scribbled notes, quills, and inkwells. Charcoal rubbings of inscriptions from ruins and tombs hung along the high plaster walls, among jottings and diagrams scrawled in multicolored chalk. The mages had likewise drawn intricate pentacles and conjuror’s circles in the open space in the middle of the floor.

Taegan was reasonably certain he could spend tendays poring over the scholars’ work and emerge little wiser than before. He actually enjoyed considerable mastery of the specialized swordsman’s magic called bladesong, but that scarcely provided the breadth or depth of esoteric knowledge that a genulne wizard possessed. He could only hope that Dorn’s “partners,” who had for some years created the enchanted weapons the half-golem and his comrades used as beast hunters for hire, knew what they were doing.

What they were doing at the moment, of course, was conferring with the brass dragon. Hunkered in the center of the room, its smooth, massive head plates nearly bumping the ceiling even so, the wyrm gleamed yellow in the white light of the floating orbs that provided illumination. Sharp blades grew from the underside of its lower jaw like extra fangs.

A dozen mages clustered around the brass, too many for Taegan to take in all at once, but a few stood out from the crowd. Robed in scarlet, gold, and orange, the stooped, wrinkled codger with the white beard must be Firefingers. He looked like some fortunate child’s doting grandfather. In contrast, the colleague at his side, a beefy, middle-aged man with a square, florid face, slicked-back raven hair, and a patch covering his left eye, carried himself with an air of prickly self-importance. An elf with an alabaster complexion, a slender frame, and pointed ears like Taegan’s own listened to the conversation with his head cocked and a frown of concentration. A small, impish-looking lass in the silvery robes of a priestess of the Moonmaiden—she must be clever, if, young as she was, she’d mastered arcane and divine magic both—took notes on a slate, the chalk scritch-scritching away. While in a corner, apart from the rest, head bowed, stood a figure so thoroughly shrouded in a cloak and cowl that Taegan couldn’t tell if it was male or female, human, elf, or orc.

“Wait here,” said the doorman, “and I’ll announce you.” He strode away.

“This is stupid,” Jivex said. “We could announce ourselves.”

“It’s a custom,” Taegan said. “People of a certain stature have servants to—”

The brass roared, the bellow deafening in the enclosed space, and cocked its head back. Fighting the Cult of the Dragon in the Gray Forest, Taegan had faced enough hostile wyrms to understand what was happening. The brass was about to discharge its breath weapon.

The air was warm, and even in the foothills of the harsh Galenas, patches of new green softened the stark contours of the slopes, while a first sprinkling of tiny white and purple wildflowers adorned the winding, ascending trail. Kara’s throbbing soprano voice made the landscape even more beguiling. Wearing her willowy human form, partly to shield herself from the Rage, mounted on a white mare, her flowing silver-blond hair shining in the sun, the dragon bard sang a poignant song of love lost and ultimately regained.

As was often the case, to Dorn, the pleasures inherent in the moment felt like mockery, and why not? The simple truth was that things had turned to dung as usual. He, Kara, Raryn, and Chatulio wanted to reach their destination quickly, yet the need to avoid a flight of frenzied dragons had forced them north, off their chosen route and away from their goal. Moreover, he suspected that they were lost, despite Raryn’s uncanny sense of direction and Kara’s assurances that she knew the Galenas well.

So glum was his humor that he almost told Kara to hold her tongue. Not long ago, he would have, particularly since she was really a dragon. He had, after all, spent decades hating wyrms, and indeed, despised them still. But since meeting Kara there were times when the loathing softened, moments when it even felt mean and wrong. It disturbed him to imagine that he might one day lose it entirely. It was who he was.

Then Chatulio hissed, “Enough!”

Though no shapeshifter like Kara, the copper dragon was a master of illusion, and he wore the semblance of Dorn’s huge—and comically ugly—swaybacked, cross-eyed, scrofulous piebald stallion. No actual horse, even the strongest, could have carried the weight of the half-golem’s massive frame and enchanted iron arm and leg up and down the steep trails for very long.

Everyone else regarded the copper in surprise. Dorn belatedly realized that, wallowing in his own foul mood, he

hadn’t noticed that Chatulio hadn’t cracked a joke or played a prank in several hours. That, coupled with the display of ill temper, was cause for concern.

“Rage eating at you?” asked Raryn, seated on his shaggy brown pony. As always, it was difficult to tell where the squat arctic dwarfs long white hair and goatee left off and his polar bear fur tunic began. His exposed skin was a flaking, sunburned red that would have been excruciating for a human, but caused his folk no distress whatsoever.

“What do you think?” Chatulio snarled. “Of course it is, and that constant shrillness scraping at my brain…” He drew in a long breath and let it out slowly. “I’m sorry, bluebird. I didn’t mean it. You know I love your singing.”

“It’s all right,” Kara said. “Too much of anything, even music, can wear on the nerves. I just went on and on because it helps me quell the frenzy in myself. Why don’t we play the riddle game instead?”

Chatulio snorted. “We’d better play teams, and each partner up with one of the small folk. Otherwise, they won’t stand a—”

“Hush!” said Raryn, holding up one broad, stubby-fingered hand. The dragons possessed inhumanly acute senses, but the dwarf ranger, relaxed as he often looked, was ever vigilant, and evidently he’d detected some sign of possible danger even before his reptilian comrades.

After another moment, Dorn heard the same thing: clopping hooves, the creak of leather, and the clink of metal—riders coming down the trail.

He cast about for a place to hide, but didn’t see one. Discerning the tenor of his thoughts, Kara said, “Chatulio or I can cast a magical concealment.”