A Dragon at Worlds' End (28 page)

"Such beauty, such immensity," she murmured. "So this is the ocean great, of which I have heard." She stared at the ball for a long moment and then turned him a glance, with new respect in her eyes.

"And this, too, you told the truth about, it seems."

Lady Tschinn was close to a conviction that Relkin was just what he said he was, a simple soldier from a faraway empire, albeit a soldier with a giant kebbold for a mount or a companion, if you could believe his fantastic story about the beast being able to speak and march with an army. Lady Tschwinn could not understand why such a kebbold would refrain from simply eating the men in such an army. The concept of intelligent kebbolds was still too much for her to accept.

The young man was still telling some kind of untruth, but probably it was of a more ordinary variety than she had earlier suspected. So… a young soldier, lost in the heart of the great continent, and in need of friends. She considered him carefully. In truth he was shapely. Slender, but already muscular in an adult way. She had already noticed the calm in those young eyes. She recalled the speed with which he had moved in the brief fight in the banquet hall. Presence and speed, she liked that combination. Perhaps she would take the boy if Pessoba would sell.

And then came a flash of light from the great crystal ball and the image of the ocean and the white ships disappeared. For a moment the ball went black, and then a bizarre scene occupied the crystal. First there was a flat plane, purple and without texture. Across the plane ran a silver wall, at right angles to it, which continued off into the distance, where the purple plane ended in a flat horizon beneath a pink sky. A group of small silvery clouds was moving across the sky.

Floating overhead came a pair of dusky orange toroids, their surfaces puckered like waffles. From their central holes came beams of light that struck down onto the purple flatness.

The view changed again. There, floating in the crystal, was a face. Calmly it seemed to look back at them from enormous green eyes framed in a face that was like both that of a man and that of some huge insect. The features were jammed up beneath the great luminous eyes. The ears supported growths like antennae that curved up and forward in front of the face.

Relkin shivered uncontrollably, it was one of
them
…

The things he had seen floating above the pit in ancient Dzu. The things that had dogged his step from that moment, or so it seemed.

Lady Tschinn gave a terrible cry and slammed her hand down on the sphere to halt it. The image vanished. The crystal became yellow and opaque once more.

"What are you?" The long finger pointed at him. She was shaking. "Where did you see the Sinni? You, a mere soldier, have known the Sinni? This is simply impossible."

"I don't know them. I don't even know what they are. But I have seen them. At Dzu, when we killed the Meso-master in the pit, they were there. We all saw them."

"What?" Her perfect forehead creased with confusion. "Are you some golem made by Althis and Sternwall? What are you really?"

Althis and Sternwall
! Relkin was rocked. Those were the very names given to him by the golden elves, in the hidden city of the dwarves beneath the forest of Valur.

"Answer me, or else I will order you destroyed."

"I have seen
them
, or things like that, but not that place. I've never seen that particular image. Don't you see? That didn't come from my mind."

He clenched his fists in frustration. "Those other things actually happened. That first one was the fight at Sprian's Ridge. That was the worst fight I've ever been in. I never want to see another one like it. The other thing was at Dzu. You saw my dragon, the Broketail. Those things are from my life. That last thing we saw was different. I have never experienced it."

"Maglaea," she said to herself. "Maglaea's warning has come at last. The prophecy will be completed."

"I don't know what they want."

"So, you are a messenger. You bring us the death knell. You are the Iudo Faex."

"What is that?"

Her face had grown pale and hard. "You are the harbinger of doom. The one who will end the Game."

For a long moment there was silence, and then Lord Pessoba let out a shriek of rage. In a moment things became very confused. Pessoba's guards burst in. Pessoba yelled that he was being victimized and he would not give up his property.

The lady's guards engaged Pessoba's in a shoving match. She invoked the authority of the Arkelauds in an equally loud voice. Pessoba denied that it applied to him. The Arkelauds no longer ruled the Game, or the city, he cried. They had no right to steal his property. He had paid good gold for the youth. He had all property rights in consequence.

The lady commanded Pessoba to obey the authority of the Arkelauds. He disagreed violently and broke for the door, propelling Relkin ahead of him. Relkin, confused and alarmed by the open display of weapons by the guards, moved with Pessoba. There were blows, grunts of pain as the guards jostled. Shouts of alarm went up. One guard was knocked down and they scrambled over him and burst out of the small room. They ran through the huge corridors, with the cold stone faces of dead elven lords staring down from the walls.

Relkin was elated and busily calculated his chances of getting away. This was exactly the sort of chaotic situation he had hoped for. He looked back over his shoulder. Their pursuit was coming, but it was still around the last corner. Was there a door anywhere here? A window? He felt a tug at his elbow, turned, and found Pessoba pressed close to him, almost eyeball to eyeball.

"If you run away from me here, you will not escape."

he puffed. "They will catch you and kill you. Just in case you really are the Iudo Faex."

Relkin reflected for a moment. He didn't know his way around this vast place. And if he was caught by the Arkelauds, he'd probably be slain out of hand. Perhaps this wasn't the moment to be making a break for freedom. It was a hell of a pity, but Relkin had a strong suspicion that Pessoba might be right.

They passed through the main gates of the Overlook of the Arkelauds and found their coach ready and waiting. Moments later they were moving swiftly down the road leading back to the city while the sweating guards ran alongside, their weapons and armor clinking in the darkness.

There was no pursuit. The Arkelauds dared not move that openly. Even though Pessoba was a relative nobody, they could not wage war within the city walls. Their Game position was weak. The Tendency might crush them completely if they drew down unwelcome attention. Thus the coach zigzagged down the mountain road and then sped swiftly through the streets with no immediate pursuit. The guards gradually fell behind, despite their best efforts and glares from Pessoba. They arrived at the house with no guards except the driver. Once again Relkin thought of escape, but as the coach slowed in front of Pessoba's house, the door swung open and four fresh guards sprang out to surround them. Biting back a snarl of frustration, Relkin left the coach and walked back inside the prison of the lord.

Mulled wine was brought them on the terrace. Relkin ate a handful of glazed fruits and stared gloomily at the night view of the dark lake and the distant light around the statue of Bos.

He felt as glazed as the bonbons in his hand. The perfect moment had come and gone and left him a prisoner still. Worse, he was now marked for death. He had been named the "Iudo Faex." Legends and myths were in play. Relkin knew to his cost that such things could be dangerous.

For once the bossy tones of Pessoba were absent. Relkin glanced at the elf lord and saw a face frozen in immobility as the mind behind it performed furious calculations of the odds facing various efforts to sell Relkin for a good price.

Relkin understood a little of what Pessoba was thinking now, and he could see that the lord was dithering, unable to choose. He knew he was damaged goods. Pessoba was probably thinking of a way to unload him as quickly as possible. How long Relkin survived after that was unknowable, but after his visit to the Overlook of the Arkelauds, his chances had definitely declined.

Relkin looked at the dark lake and the distant lights in silence. He thought of his dragon, lost somewhere in the land of the Ardu. Then he thought of the ruins of his life, and of Eilsa Ranardaughter. Bitter self-recriminations came easily to the surface.

He should never have gone out hunting that day. He should have remembered the prime rule of the dragonboy's life: Always keep your dragon in view. That way they could never get in serious trouble. And he'd broken that rule and thoughtlessly gone out hunting in a foreign land, mostly because he was bored in camp. And now he was lost.

Pessoba suddenly stood and swilled down the last of his wine.

"To bed with you, child," he said. Pessoba's eyes had turned golden. He snapped his fingers at Relkin with an angry gesture. The guards came in and formed up around Relkin. He was escorted to the secure room in which he slept. The door shut behind him and the bars thudded home.

There was just the ventilation slit, and little light came in from that. In the dimness Relkin groped his way along the wall until he found the hard little pallet they'd given him to sleep on.

He had a vision of Bazil's joboquin broken in several places, the cinch strap giving way, the equipment falling and being lost. No one in the Ardu land knew how to take proper care of a leatherback wyvern. Nails would break, cuts would turn septic, what was left of the equipment would be lost. And what would that dragon think of his dragonboy, who had left him one day and not returned? Relkin didn't think he'd ever faced a bleaker time than this.

Eventually, after staring into the dark for a while, he offered up a perfunctory prayer to Old Caymo. At the back of his mind he also offered up a small one to the Mother just in case she was listening.

If these were the best dice the god could come up with, then maybe Relkin would have to abandon the old gods and subscribe full-heartedly to the worship of the Great Mother.

Later he slept and endured evil dreams. Occasionally he tossed and moaned.

He did not notice when the air in the center of the room began to shimmer strangely.

There was a faint hissing, as of water dripping onto a hot iron.

The shimmer in the air increased. Small sparkles of light flashed momentarily. A dark thread appeared, blacker than the darkness. Slowly it grew to a sheet. Something was thickening in the darkness. It grew from the thread, bulging, wobbling, slowly shifting into existence.

In time it became the figure of the elf lord Mot Pulk.

For a moment Mot Pulk gazed down through the dark on the sleeping Figure of Relkin, then he crouched beside Relkin. From within his robe he produced a dark crystal, cut with many facets.

He played the light on Relkin's face. Relkin awoke with a startled grunt and his eyes fell on the dark crystal. He froze. The crystal shimmered strangely, and he knew that some devilish magic was at work. Then he found he was unable to control his limbs.

The crystal moved, the light shone on him, and he got to his feet, without willing it himself. A face floated there, an elf lord with an eye patch, the one they called Mot Pulk.

Mot Pulk himself stood there, breathing slowly, trying hard to keep from shouting out in triumph. He, Mot Pulk, had done it! The most dangerous ploy in the Game, some said. Full materialization within the enemy's fortification! A process that took hours, during which one was completely vulnerable as the life force was poured, slowly, across the subworld of chaos and back into the real world of Ryetelth, only in a different location. For long periods during the spell there would be two copies of he who attempted this feat of the magic of the Old Red Aeon. Either copy would be weak, virtually helpless. Of course, one would be the primary, safely lodged in secure surroundings. The other, however, would be projected into a place of danger where it might be destroyed, or worse yet, captured at any point. The results would be fatally weakening to the primary.

Materialization was rarely used now. Once, when the Game was ruled by buccaneers and adventurers, it had been more frequent. But the buccaneers had died out with the age of the Arkelauds, in large part because more cautious players had killed the wild men. The Great Game rewarded the cautious players and thus had come about the era of the great cliques, like the Tendency and the old Cabal.

But Mot Pulk was a throwback to the great days of old. He was a buccaneer, a jackbooter ready to seize any opportunity. The higher-ups sneered at him, of course. They had always sneered at the adventurous. Now they all thought him finished. Unable to break into the settled ranks of the first three hundreds, he faced inevitable decline, they said. They carped about the lush beauty of the worlds he invented. They sneered at his voluptuaries, at his love of flesh and pulsating life. The probable worlds of the Tendency were bijou works of art, small and tasteful, controlled and dead. Mot Pulk worked in older genres, and was glad to see life spurting and leaping, while growing in its own direction.

Mot Pulk had no time for the controlled environments preached by the Tendency rulers, Zulbanides and the rest. They were timid souls and thus they had outlasted the greater talents of the game. Mot Pulk was younger, born late in the cycle of the elves. He was something the older generations could not comprehend. They held him in contempt and refused him entry to one of the higher cliques.

And so Mot Pulk had decided to act alone. He would take advantage of the situation while others were frozen with indecision. Pessoba, that mouse, would be huddling in drugged sleep within his fortress. Mot Pulk had bribed a servant to get a layout of the place. He had studied it from without and traveled its halls by astral projection. He knew where to materialize. And he knew it would be relatively safe. Pessoba would not have mounted adequate defenses against materialization. Since Pessoba would not have dreamed of trying to materialize inside a hostile environment himself, he could not conceive that anyone would try to do it inside his own house.