A Dragon at Worlds' End (38 page)

They questioned him carefully about the villages, and then about the rest of the region. There was a small detachment of guards in the town of Behar, about ten miles south. And there had been some excitement in the area after refugees from the upriver towns passed through. There had been all kinds of rumors, most of which had been dismissed as pure moonshine. Now, he could see, they were not.

Meanwhile, Norwul had organized the Ardu to move around in the brush, appearing briefly so they could be seen and then hiding again, to give the captive the idea that the raiding party was far larger than one hundred men.

Bazil also put on a demonstration with Ecator, whipping the huge blade around him so that it hummed in the air.

Then they released their victim and told him to go home at once to his village. As soon as he was gone, they moved upstream toward Yump, which became the first of many villages to burn in the Beharo.

Over the next few days this pattern was repeated. They moved quickly through the farmlands, burning villages, haystacks, fields, and anything else that would catch fire and send up a plume of smoke. The roads south filled up with refugees and rumors.

There were few casualties. The villagers were far from warlike and inclined to flee at the first sign of smoke and flames in their neighborhood. At the town of Woot, a small group of guards tried to make a stand, but the Ardu killed them to a man and hung their bodies from the trees. The entire town emptied southward and the Ardu burned it to the ground.

The conservative Ardu who had questioned Bazil's understanding of war were won over now. They enjoyed this relatively easy and painless work, and from burning these places they derived a degree of revenge for all they had suffered.

At the campfires, Bazil tried to make them understand that harder fighting lay ahead, that all this was merely the opening gambit.

"We upset enemy. They come out to find us. We ambush them unless they outnumber us too much. Eventually we have to find a way into their city. That will be the hard work."

Relkin's instruction in declension and volumata proceeded quickly. Despite appearances, and her prejudices against males, Ribela had to admit the young man was a quick study. The volumes were difficult, of course; they were hard for anyone to master. Like playing a viol with one's vocal cords, after all. But even there he made progress.

Yet even Relkin's attention could finally fail. His eyes dulled. He grew listless.

Ribela noticed eventually and was forced to stop. "Whatever is the matter with you?" she snapped.

"I haven't eaten anything today."

Ribela bit off the first thing that came into her mind. It was far too harsh. She swallowed and murmured a prayer to the Mother.

"Yes, of course." She had to admit that nutrition was essential, even to her. The body of young Ferla had been hungry for a while.

Relkin arose and went down to the larder in the kitchen. There was hardly anything in the cupboard. Ferla had brought fresh fruits and pods from the forest every day. Ribela, of course, would not know which fruits were edible. Relkin shrugged. The easy life was over, it seemed, whether he liked the thought or not. He took himself off to the trees. When he returned, he had a fair selection of the fruits he had seen Ferla collect. He sat in the pergola with a knife and some bowls and peeled fruits and pods and broke out ripe purple beans.

Ribela brought a jug of water. Relkin ate in moody silence. The purple beans weren't as good as when Ferla picked them. She seemed to know which pods were ripe.

It was hard for him not to keep hoping that Ferla would somehow reawake in her body and oust the witch. When that body moved, he saw only the grace and beauty and his emotions were aroused all over again.

Ribela recalled Lessis's voice and her strictures on handling men, especially young ones. "Be understanding, sister"—that is what Lessis would always say.

By the breath, but sometimes it was hard. She finished some pieces of fruit. The entire process of digestion had always seemed gross and disgusting to Ribela, never more so than at this point. Still, this was what duty had brought her to.

"I'm sorry, young man. You have been living in an idyllic dream that has suddenly ended. I can see that you're unhappy, and I think it's quite understandable. But you have been summoned back to duty. You remain a soldier in the Legions of Argonath. You have work to do."

Relkin shrugged wearily. "I don't know, Lady, sometimes it just seems impossible. We were trying to get back to the Legions. It wasn't our fault we were separated in the first place. I mean, the volcano blew us so far out into the ocean that we never saw the island again. We landed and we headed east. We were in the jungle. Way north of here."

He slapped his knee and gave her a bitter smile.

"There I go again. I keep forgetting I don't know where this is."

"This is an illusion, child, a fantasy world created by the Lords Tetraan."

"Then are we in Mirchaz?"

"Ah, no." And Ribela realized at last that she didn't know where this was any more than Relkin did. Her astral spell had maintained a constant link with her body in faraway Cunfshon. That had sundered, and now she was lost.

"Then we aren't in Mirchaz?"

"It would be more accurate to say that the only way to escape from this place will be through passage of the Game nexus, where the lords focus their energies. That nexus lies in Mirchaz."

Relkin chewed his lips while he digested that.

"All right, I get it. The only way out is through Mirchaz, so in a way we are in Mirchaz because it's the only other place we can go."

She nodded.

"Well, we were way north of Mirchaz. We were trying to get back to the mouth of that big river the Legions used to reach the lands of the Kraheen."

Ribela nodded again. This was an improvement.

"But we found this other river, which ran from south to north. So we followed that, just in case it joined the river we were searching for. We went downstream a ways, and then we saw this boat, and in the boat we found Lumbee."

"Lumbee?"

"An Ardu girl, in a bad way. Wounded in the shoulder."

"You found a girl, alone in the Lands of Terror?"

"An Ardu girl, the tailed folk. We took care of her and fed her and after a while she recovered."

"The tailed folk. Oh, my, they are real?"

"Oh, yes."

Ribela was amazed. Even at her age there were fresh things to learn about the world.

"How had this girl survived alone?"

"She'd floated downriver for weeks. At first she had some food, but it ran out and her wound sapped her strength. It was starting to rot and it would have killed her eventually. I had to cauterize it and then use a little disinfectant. Mainly she was dehydrated and very hungry."

"She survived."

"Oh, yes." Unconsciously Relkin expressed something in the way he said this that told Ribela a great deal.

As Relkin told her the story of Lumbee, Ribela sensed there had been a sexual union and that Relkin still thought of Lumbee with love and affection. This brought on dizzying thoughts for Ribela of Defwode, who, to her own self-disgust, found an odd excitement in the thought of the dragonboy as a sexual being. He was young, fresh-faced, but not bland. And his lean body had the hardness of youth and an innate muscular appeal. All of this made her weirdly nervous when she looked at him. What was going on? She never had these base urges. She was far above such gross, corporeal matters.

Then she recalled that, after all, this was Ferla's body, not hers, expressing its own crude, animal desires, not hers. And yet there was that excitement. It had been half a millennium since Ribela had allowed a sexual thought to cross her head, but now it was happening.

"And so, the girl survived and then begged you to go to her country with her. Did you plan to live there happily ever after?"

Relkin spread his hands out and told her of the campaign against the slavers.

"I see." Ribela shook her head. And in the meantime, what had gone on between Relkin and this young Ardu female? Ribela shuddered as she realized that for a moment, she had wanted that for herself.

"You have had a wild old time of it, I can see."

Relkin had to agree.

"And yet I still do not understand why I find you here. This is Ferla's body, not Lumbee. Where is Lumbee?"

Relkin was about to explain when Ribela saw something behind him and went rigid. She stood up and muttered some words of power that ended with a crack like that of a great whip. She raised her hands and held them in front of her and from out of the undergrowth beyond the pergola stumbled a nightmarish creature with the head of an insect and the body of a skinny monkey.

Step by step it approached, dragged by Ribela's spell. Relkin stared at it, horrified.

"What is this thing?" she said.

"I don't know. I've never seen it before."

Ribela brought the thing to a halt just outside the pergola. She held it steady with her spell while she strode around it, examining it. It stood about three feet high and looked like a mantis crossed with a gibbon.

"It has a black mark on the top of its head, I think it is the same face that shows on the moons at night."

"That is the elf lord that rules this place."

They were interrupted by a sudden laugh from right behind them. They whirled around and found Mot Pulk staring at them from the other side of the pergola.

"What do I find here?" said the elf lord, whose eye showed golden as he came forward. Relkin felt yet another tread on the ground and saw that Biroik had been summoned down from his pedestal.

Relkin turned to confront the huge demon. Not even Katun could have fought this demon and hoped to win.

"Do not involve yourself, child," snapped Mot Pulk. "Or I will have Biroik chastise you. My interest is all in my lovely Ferla. Something has happened to Ferla and I want to know what it is."

Ribela muttered the words of a freezing spell. Mot Pulk drew back in alarm.

"What! You dare sorcery on my person?"

He clapped his hands as he ran back. "Biroik!"

The demon, with huge eyes flaring, lurched forward on massive thews.

Ribela threw her freezing spell on Biroik. He shuddered to a halt. She murmured more lines and raised her hand again.

Mot Pulk was stunned. The magic that powered Biroik was very great. What sorcery might this be? What had gotten into Ferla? Was it another player? Was this some master stroke by the Tendency or the old Cabal? He would show them!

Mot Pulk summoned power from the Game itself. Here in his own magic world, his connection to the power was strong. He reanimated Biroik.

The purple hide came alive. Biroik stepped forward.

Relkin attacked with fists and feet.

It evaded his strike and swung back at him with a heavy foot, but lazily, and Relkin scrambled out of the way.

Ribela tried to freeze it again with her spell, but it was resistant, with Mot Pulk's magical will enlivening it. Relkin sprang at its back, but it was ready and caught him a glancing blow with another whirling foot. Relkin was sent tumbling into the wall of the pergola and through it to end up outside in the flower bed.

Ribela's voice screamed words of power from Ferla's throat, but to no avail. The demon seized Ferla, lifted her high. The scream shifted to one of terror. Biroik looked to Mot Pulk, who was still quivering with fear and rage. He nodded. Biroik pitched Ferla into the grotto.

For an incredible moment, Relkin saw Ferla twist around, her mouth open in a soundless scream, and then she was gone, falling, turning, disappearing into the dark at the bottom of the grotto. Relkin realized that Ferla was dead. A second thought struck him—that maybe this was the death of the Queen of Mice as well.

Relkin spun around and launched himself at Mot Pulk. The next moment a tanned brown fist connected with elfin chin and lip. It connected several times in the next three seconds. Mot Pulk's screams brought Biroik, and Relkin was hauled off the elf lord by a huge hand that wrapped around his head and neck.

He struck at the demon and connected enough to annoy it. It responded by slapping him almost senseless. He spun around and fell to his knees. He saw Mot Pulk was lying on the ground, retching. Blood and a tooth came out of the elf lord's mouth.

Relkin tried to get up and after a second or so he got his legs under him and started for Mot Pulk again, but Biroik grabbed him and lifted him off the ground, where his legs kicked futilely. His arms flailed but could not make contact.

Slowly Mot Pulk pulled himself off the ground and stood up. His elfin visage had been transformed. The pale skin was massively cut and bruised. Blood had caked on the chin. The lips were swollen beyond recognition and the nose was swelling enormously.

"And to think how well I've treated you," he growled. "Such ingratitude."

"I will kill you," sputtered Relkin.

"Biroik!"

The message came to the city of Marneri on the wings of a swift ocean gull. It entered the harbor just three days after leaving the Tower of Swallows in Andiquant, and flew to the roost above the Novitiate. The Mistress of Animals, Fi-ice the witch, was sent for. She retrieved the message from the bird's foot and gave it a bucket of herring, for it was very hungry.

The seal on the message sent a shiver through her. That "R" stood for only one person in the world, the Queen of Mice. The message was addressed to Lagdalen of the Tarcho.

It was midsummer, but there was a cool breeze coming off the Long Water. Fi-ice paused to pull out a shawl before taking the message herself down to Water Street, to the narrow building where Lagdalen had her office.

As she went, the witch prayed that the poor girl was not about to be torn from her normal life in the city and sent off on some terrifying witch mission. Lagdalen was still only a child, but already she had the reputation as a Lessis in the making. They said she was gifted in the magic arts.

Fi-ice knew they were wrong about that. Lagdalen was less than proficient in the arts of spellmaking. Her years of service to the Gray Lady had exposed her to sorcery on the grandest scale, but she had learned little of it herself.