A Dragon at Worlds' End (37 page)

The Sinni had not prepared her for this. What was going on here?

Relkin and Ferla sat in the pergola taking the late afternoon sun. It was their favorite time of day. The air was warm, the land itself was content beneath the sun. They relaxed in each other's arms. Soon, when the sun went down in the riot of orange and green yellows that was customary at sunset, they would go back to the apartments and make love. Then they would eat. Then they might stare at the moons in a drowsy, dreamy way. Then they would sleep.

Relkin hugged Ferla close to him. She responded by turning tender hips toward him and putting her mouth up to be kissed. Their lips met and they held the kiss for a long time. Soon they would go downstairs to the waiting bed.

The familiar warmth spread through Relkin's loins. He held her more tightly. Never had he known such generous beauty. Not even Lumbee had been this enticing, this overwhelming as a sexual partner.

And then something very strange interrupted the normal sequence. Ferla's lips pulled back; she gave a little gasp as if stuck with a needle while sewing. Her eyes shot wide open and she pulled away with a shriek like a scalded cat, and ran to the door rubbing her mouth.

Relkin looked around him, but saw nothing that might have frightened her so. There was nothing there except the flowers and the view and the warm breeze.

From outside came a gagging sound. He looked back. Ferla was on her hands and knees being sick.

"Ferla?"

She did not look up. He went down and knelt beside her.

"What is wrong, Ferla? Can I help?" He put his arm around her shoulder.

She shrieked and shrank down and rolled away.

"You called me Ferla?" she screamed in a harsh voice that was quite unlike her.

"Ferla, what has happened?"

"Ferla?" She put her hands to her face, distraught. The harsh voice continued.

"What has happened? Oh, by the love of the Mother's Hand, I have lost the thread to my own body. I am cut off here. But how? What magic has done this? And this body belongs to… who?"

She looked up at him with narrowed accusing eyes.

"Ferla?" he said blankly.

"Who is Ferla?"

"You?"

"I am not Ferla, you fool boy, I am your friend Ribela. You remember me, child, we met in Ourdh, as I recall."

Relkin began to seriously question his own sanity.

"Ferla, what is this?"

"I am not Ferla!" hissed the witch. And indeed, Ferla's lovely open face was now shrouded with concern, disgust, and other unknown emotions. Her generous, loving spirit was gone. The eyes worked differently, the body was carried in a wholly new way.

"I do not understand—" began Relkin.

"You are not alone in that. I was seeking you, and I tracked you here, but in a subtle form, on the astral plane. Something broke my hold on my own body. I had to take shelter in this mind; it was almost empty anyway. I sense that it was not a real person's mind. There are no memories—it's truly as if it were born yesterday."

Relkin swallowed hard. His worlds were crashing violently together.

"Then… I…"

"You are a prisoner in this most devilish of world systems. The Lords Tetraan have transgressed against all decency here. They have done monstrous evil."

"Evil? Ferla?"

"The girl herself is not evil, but she is not real, either. Oh, these Lords Tetraan, they have become most foully corrupt. And they have unwittingly created a new force. They do not even suspect its existence, I surmise."

This last remark was not directed at Relkin, but to the empty air above the lovely little grotto. However, it triggered a chord in Relkin.

"You sensed it, then. It lives in the Game itself!"

"Ah, you have a streak of the eldritch in you, child. Lessis said you had the luck of a wizard. Maybe you would have been one in another life. You detected the thing that they have made. It sleeps, but when it wakes, it will end all of this."

This new Ferla, with the aggressive look in her eyes, was examining him minutely. Relkin felt himself blush. He realized he was naked and he was suddenly ashamed of the fact.

He backed away and found his clothes, the lovely garments given him by Lord Pessoba. Ferla followed him and watched him while he dressed. Indeed, Ribela's initial disgust at the intimate contact with a man had given way to an odd flutter in her ancient heart. She actually found herself studying his lean young body. Relkin had picked up some scars in his time in the Legions, but he was now in the flower of his youth.

"You have changed, young man, since last we met. There is a mark on you that I did not perceive then."

Relkin swallowed. That damned thing about destiny again. But where was Ferla? What the hell had happened?

Ribela had detected the mark of the Sinni themselves. She was moved to pity for him.

"Relkin, this body I inhabit. Where Ferla lived. It is not real, child."

"Ferla is gone?"

"She sleeps, that is all. I reside in her centers of higher intelligence. She maintains the body and its functions. She will come back, but her existence is tied to this place, and this is a world of magical illusion."

"Ferla is lovely," he said, feeling a strange, terrible inadequacy. He wanted to protect Ferla from this harsh truth.

Ribela resisted laughing. The disgust that had so overwhelmed her had faded. The shock of losing contact with her own body and of awakening in this one had also dissipated.

Now she felt a distinct unease when she contemplated the body of Ferla. Ribela's own chest and hips were distinctly slim and unfeminine. Ferla was a voluptuous girl in the full flower of nubility. It had been centuries since Ribela had touched another human being or been touched by one. Ferla, on the other hand, was a being made for love, with the breasts of a goddess and long hair and what, Ribela was sure, was a beautiful face.

"Ferla is lovely, Relkin, but she will have to remain here on this world. She cannot exist anywhere else."

Relkin became stonyfaced as he considered this.

"And you are still a dragoneer of the 109th Marneri. You are still on active duty. You cannot rot here in this pocket of corrupt hedonism. You must awake and escape this place."

"But Ferla?"

"You have to leave, Relkin. You are needed elsewhere."

It was hard. It took a long time for him to accept it fully. At times he came close to weeping at the thought that he must lose Ferla.

"No!" he roared into the grotto, and would have done himself, or others, harm except that Ribela calmed him with a subtle spell.

At length he slept and when he awoke he was more or less aware of who he was and what his responsibilities truly were. He knew he had another life elsewhere and that if he could escape this dream world of Mot Pulk's, then he must try.

"How can I get out of here? Mot Pulk brought me here with magic. I know not the spells that are needed to escape."

"I can teach you one. It may work."

And then Relkin realized something else.

"But, Lady, if Ferla cannot leave this place, neither can you, for you are now in Ferla's mind."

Ribela had considered this aspect of things. It did not bode well, she had to admit.

"I will teach you a spell. As to the other thing, well, tell me this: Are there any mice here?"

"I don't know. I haven't seen any. There is only what Mot Pulk wants here. It is a simple world."

The western sky had become an orange glowing mass with pink and green clouds.

"If there are no mice, then I will have to be ingenious. But now, mind me and try to memorize my words. You will have to learn several hundred lines, and some volumes."

And as the sun set, Ribela began the task of instructing him in a great spell. Relkin sat in the pergola and did his best to learn the lines as the moons tumbled up the sky.

He was doing well enough until it came time to learn volumates. These were a delicate act, and he had none of the training going back to childhood that girl novices learned before trying to enter the sisterhood of the witches. He floundered here and after a while grew too tired to continue. Ribela gave up and let him sleep.

While he did so, she contemplated her plight. There were indeed no mice, and without them she would have to attempt a complex spell that would lift her back into the astral plane and perhaps allow her to return to herself, far away there in the cell in Andiquant.

She was sure that her body there must have slipped into pure unconsciousness. The mice would have ceased to run; there would be no power from that source. If this world were eliminated, she would die; her mind would be lost and her body would die soon afterward.

She observed the culmination of the moons' nightly show. The sardonic features of Mot Pulk loomed above. These elf lords had taken undiluted egoism to new heights. Not even the Doom Masters of Padmasa had reached so high!

By first light she was more confident. By careful dredging of her memory she had come up with some sections from the Birrak that would give her a good basis for an astral spell without mice. She went down to the apartment and stirred Relkin to life. There was no time to lose.

The Ardu flotilla emerged from the river gorge into the flat lands that lay just north of Mirchaz. Here there were villages and lush green fields, the breadbasket of Mirchaz.

Bazil understood all this with a single look. He told Lumbee they must halt and pull ashore here. It was time to go to war.

The Ardu men were puzzled. This was not Mirchaz, surely? Why didn't they go to Mirchaz and defeat it, like they always defeated the slavers? The slavers would break and run if they pressed them hard. They always did.

Bazil explained. "We need to plan this carefully. We are close to Mirchaz now. We need to know how close. If this farmland feeds the city, then this is a good place to attack if we want to draw the enemy out of his fortresses."

The Ardu were new to war; indeed, they were new to the whole world outside of their savage realm in the Lands of Terror. Norwul had come to understand that the dragon was as intelligent as any of them, and far more knowledgeable than they in the arts of war. He led the progressive group, about half of the Ardu men. The other half were uneasy. They found it difficult, in their hearts, to accept Bazil's intelligence. Now they argued. Some wanted to go on and attack directly, before the enemy could prepare its defenses. Others preferred to trust the forest god.

Bazil was sure that the enemy had been alerted some days ahead by the fugitives the attacking party had driven downriver from the upcountry towns. He was forcing himself to try to think like boy. He had been around that boy all his life. He had seen boy in every possible mood, from jubilation to deep sorrow. They were brothers as if born from the same egg. so how did boy think? Because Baz also knew that, while dragons were intelligent and quite able to converse, they were not as wily as humans, not nearly as good at planning ahead.

The argument grew heated. Bazil finally pushed men aside and regained their attention. "Stop argument," said the dragon with a massive finality. "You are men of the forest. I am a dragon of the battlefield. I see how the men do these things. You listen to me."

All the Ardu stared at him with stunned eyes. Receiving direct orders from giant pujish was an extraordinary thing. The pujish had to be a god—there was no other way. Had to be. Maybe not the forest god himself, but some kind of roving god of the forest. Ardu gods were all strictly territorial, spirits of heath and grove who did not try to affect events anywhere but in their territories. A mobile god was almost as difficult a concept for them as a talking pujish.

"The men in Mirchaz will come in much greater numbers than any force we have faced before. That means we have to take precautions. We need to draw the enemy on to our defensive positions, or we need to hit and run and try to panic him. So first we require knowledge of the area."

"Why do we not just go there and kill them?" said one of the most conservative of the older Ardu.

"Because they know we're coming. They will be ready for us. We would have to fight our way in through a high wall. The men who make cities always put up these things."

The obvious truth of this sank in. Even the conservative Ardu could see that Bazil was right. They hunkered down and began to talk.

Later they hauled the raft up a shady creek and pulled the boats into the trees. Scouts went out in three directions and returned after an hour. They were about a mile from a village upstream and two miles from another downstream.

It was decided to capture someone from the nearer of the two villages. To question him they had the Ardu from the upriver towns who spoke the tongue of Mirchaz. A party went out in search of a likely victim at once.

Bazil and Lumbee sat with Norwul and a few of the other robust males and discussed what they had to do. Bazil laid out the ground rules for a swift campaign of guerrilla war.

"First, we must keep our actual numbers a secret. We must make them think we have many more with us than we have."

The Ardu nodded carefully at this thought.

"Second, we have to make them fear us. We attack the villages, burn them, drive the people to the city."

"Do we kill the people?"

"Not necessary. Better they go to the city and spread fear. We make many fires every day, let them see plenty smoke. That help, too."

The search party came back with a villager whose eyes almost bugged out of his head when he saw Bazil loom over him. He went into dragon freeze at once and had to be pinched and slapped repeatedly to get him out of it. Then the Ardu from the towns began to question him. The poor man was so frightened he held nothing back. Their picture of their surroundings rapidly filled out.

They were in the Beharo, the "outside towns" of Mirchaz. The city itself lay ten miles farther on, through the hills to the south and across the lake that was hidden there. The Beharo was a fertile region of farms and small villages. The nearest were Yump and Passter. Their victim had been to visit a money lender in Yump and was on his way home when he'd been nabbed.