Elvenborn (33 page)

"I never doubted that you would find a way," she said serenely.

When they ended their conversation, and he had covered the teleson-screen again, he waited impatiently for Gel to return so that he could work out all the details of this addition to the plan.

For the first time since he had taken over the command of the Great Lords' army, he began to hope he could save, not only his own people, but everyone involved. Or at least, almost every¬one. And that was so much more than he had ever thought he'd be able to do, that he felt as if he had just drunk an entire bottle of sparkling wine.

Now, let's hope all this doesn't prove to be as ephemeral as wine-joy!

18

The ears outside Lord Kyrtian's tent are a lot keener than he has any reason to guess, Keman thought with glee, as he heard Kyrtian concluding the second conversation of the day with Lady Lydiell. So, Elvenlord, why haven't you fig¬ured out that you have dragons on your doorstep—literally?

Keman, Shana's foster-brother, was, of course, that dragon. So was his partner in this spying endeavor, although she came

from a Lair that had never known there were other dragons in the world until she met him. Dragons, with their ability to shapechange into virtually anything they chose, were uniquely suited to spying on the Elves, who could easily crack any dis¬guise wrought with illusions. In spite of the fact that in his real form he was easily forty or fifty times the bulk of even the strongest and tallest male human (or Elf) he'd ever seen, the draconic gift of being able to push mass and weight else¬where—they called it, "into the Out"—made it possible for him to masquerade as even a small child.

He and Dora had shapechanged themselves into human fighters and insinuated themselves into the Great Lords' army as soon as it became obvious that this new commander was just as brilliant as the old one had been incompetent. When they first began this task on Shana's behalf, they had gone from one Great Lord's household to another in the forms of various slaves—since no Great Lord ever bothered to take note of a mere human so long as he didn't disobey and had no hint of magic as an Elf understood it about him. They had actually been in Lord Kyndreth's household as a pair of pages when the first news of Lord Kyrtian's victories came in. From there it had been a matter of simplicity to insinuate themselves into the company of fighters the Great Lord sent to augment the army.

The only hard part had been slipping away at night every so often to hunt, for a dragon needed vastly more food than a hu¬man. Even that hadn't been too horribly difficult, and they had been keeping Shana informed faithfully of all that this new commander was doing. It had taken him a little time to get used to his partner's outward appearance, however; having a griz¬zled, muscle-bound, surly male look at him while he was hear¬ing Dora's voice in his mind was a little unsettling. And it hardly needed to be said that while they were in these guises, they could not even make the most casual of affectionate ges¬tures towards one another, not even the sorts of things that had been possible as pages. Only when they flew in their own shapes could he court her as she deserved.

Keman and Dora weren't the guards just outside the tent flaps of Lord Kyrtian's tent—that position was reserved for the

handful of men that Sergeant Gel had tested and tried and found trustworthy. For one thing, although both dragons might look like fighters, they didn't have any real skill with the formidable weapons that they held—skill did not come with the shape, alas. They hadn't even been among the volunteers hoping for such a position. No, they were guarding the wagons holding the possessions of the other Elvenlords serving as Kyrtian's offi¬cers, possessions which had not been unpacked for days (much to the disgruntlement of their owners) since the speed of march had not permitted the kind of leisurely camping with luxuries that the previous commander had allowed.

It was a good thing that darkness cloaked any faint signs of his impatience, for Keman could hardly contain himself. They had known for some time that Lord Kyrtian was very unlike Lord Levelis, the previous commander, in more ways than sim¬ple competence. For one thing, his method of training was as¬tounding—using magic to counterfeit blades and other weapons, so that it was possible to acquire real skill without ever getting hurt! For the first time, a human slave delegated to the position of "fighter" stood a decent chance of surviving— and would manage to get through his training period without being killed or maimed.

That in and of itself had brought excitement among the ranks to a fever pitch, but there was soon more to rejoice in. Rumor in the ranks had soon been proved truth—that Lord Kyrtian actu¬ally cared about the humans who served in the ranks and was not inclined to throw them into combat and use them up the way his predecessor had. But until tonight they had not realized how wildly different his attitudes toward humans were from those of other Elvenlords!

It seemed that Lady Moth and the late and lamented Lord Va-lyn were not the only ones of their kind to regard humans as something other than objects of possession, creatures destined by birth to serve and be consumed and tossed away at the whims of their Elven masters. Even the rebellious Young Lords had proved something of a disappointment once they had a modicum of power—the humans under their control might not have to fear the terrible punishments inflicted on them by magic

anymore, but they were still slaves, and treated as such. Not so with Lord Kyrtian, whose very second-in-command was a hu¬man, much to the further disgruntlement of the Elvenlords serv¬ing as officers.

Wait until Shana hears all this! he thought, hardly able to contain himself and wait for the next shift of guards to come and relieve them.

It was clear to Keman at least that someone from the Wizards was going to have to approach Lord Kyrtian. They couldn't af¬ford not to, now. It was clear from his two conversations that he did not want to find himself forced to hunt down the Wizards, which he would, if he managed to defeat the Young Lords.

What was more, it was entirely likely that he could find them and beat them in combat. The one thing that had saved them in the past was that the Elvenlords had used mostly magic against the Wizards—and the Wizards had used mostly magic against their foes. The problem was that the Wizards' main defense now was the use of iron—which was brilliant, but did prevent them from using magic offensively. The dragons could help, but they were as vulnerable to real weapons as humans and halfbloods were—and Lord Kyrtian could field an army of slaves that would have no difficulty in defeating any Wizard army.

Unless, of course, the Iron People could be convinced to help. Ah, but why should they? Why should they actually fight, when they themselves were in no real danger from the Elven¬lords and they could always go back to the south and safety? Their leader, the Iron Priest Diric, certainly liked Shana and her friends, but he was a pragmatic sort, and he could lose his posi¬tion if he advocated something that would bring danger to the Iron People with little or no reward.

Ah, but now they knew that Lord Kyrtian didn't want to fight the Wizards. True, he might find himself in the position where he had to appear to fight them, but if the Wizards were in secret partnership with Lord Kyrtian, he could obey the orders to do so with every appearance of obedience to the Council. If, for in¬stance, he knew where the Wizards actually were, he could hunt unsuccessfully, but dutifully, everywhere that they weren't until the Council got tired of it all and disbanded the army.

Sooner or later they would do just that; especially if the Wiz¬ards were able to help in that direction. It wouldn't be difficult to stage scenes of abandoned camps and great desolation, to make it look as if, once chased from the haven of the Citadel, the Wiz¬ards had found it impossible to survive in the wilderness.

Keman's thoughts filled with contempt for the "Old Whin-ers." They would have had that very problem if it hadn't been for Shana and the dragons. Caellach Gwain and the others like him were no more equipped to take care of themselves than the pampered Elvenlords themselves would have been if stripped of magical powers. Put some forlorn "settlements" together, . made of mud huts with crumbling walls and caved-in roofs, and scatter a few bones about, and leave them for Lord Kyrtian to "discover" and the Elvenlords might be convinced that if any halfbloods did survive they were not worth pursuing.

And then, Keman thought, when we're secure again, we might even be able to secretly trade with Lord Kyrtian for things that we need. Although he liked Diric and the Iron Peo¬ple, and the folk of the Trader clans, enormously, it made him very uneasy that the Wizards now depended on these two sets of relative strangers (who after all had agendas of their own) for the things they couldn't produce themselves. Keman could never forget that the Iron People had once held him, Shana, Mero, and Father Dragon captive—Iron Priest Diric had nearly been toppled from his seat of power once, and it could happen again. Keman would rather that his friends and foster-sister had one more layer to their net of survival.

The Wizards had once stolen what they wanted from the supply-wagons of the Elvenlords themselves, but that had all come to an end when the Elvenlords realized that they still ex¬isted and were pilfering supplies. Such thefts were too danger¬ous now and, in fact, had been forbidden by the tenuous treaty that the Elvenlords had agreed to with them—but the Wizards were not craftsfolk or terribly successful farmers. Hunters—oh my, yes—they merely had to magically transport an animal from the forest or fields by magic to kill it, and even the least skilled of them could do that, for magic was one stalker that no beast could scent. Meat of all sorts they had in abundance, and

hides, and the rather lovely horns of alicorns, but the best they were able to do in the way of agriculture was a bit of vegetable-gardening. Shana, one of the few Wizards to manage the trans¬portation spell that enabled her to move living creatures intact, had been able to bring the flock of sheep that had been at the old Citadel, and had purloined some chickens that had strayed and so were technically not Elvenlord property. Keman and Kalamadea had brought them goats, and even horses, but the terrain around the caves they had taken to live in was simply unsuited for cultivating grain.

And as for crafts, well, at some point they were going to run out of cloth, and there weren't more than a dozen of the fully-human ex-slaves among them that knew how to spin and weave. There was one single potter, and no glassmakers. As for metal-smiths, well, the less said, the better. True, the Iron Peo¬ple had smiths in plenty, but they were down in the plain, and thus far there hadn't been a great deal that the Wizards could provide that the Iron People wanted in trade.

At least three quarters of that lack of skilled workers was due to the attitudes of Caellach Gwain and his cronies. What sensi¬ble wild human or even a former slave, especially one with skills and a trade, would care to settle among people who re¬garded him as an inferior peon who should be happy to serve his "betters" with no thought for compensation? No few of the slaves that had escaped during the Young Lord's initial revolt had settled briefly with the Wizards then drifted off with the Traders to settle elsewhere.

They're as bad as the Elvenlords, Keman thought, not for the first time.

For now they were relying on the things that had once been stockpiled in the Citadel; they hadn't been able to carry those things away with them, but the Citadel had somehow remained unpenetrated—or at least, no one had bothered to loot it or de¬stroy what was in it. Shana had teams of the younger wizards working together to transport everything possible out of there and into the hands of those who actually owned the things or into the storage-rooms of their new home. Some things were in surplus—anything that didn't get used up or suffer much from

wear and tear. Nevertheless, they had more—many more— bodies to clothe and mouths to feed than they'd had back when only halfblooded Wizards lived in the old Citadel.

But if they could set up a trading-agreement with a real El-ven estate ... well, then their transportation magics could be used to swap hides and meat, raw lumber, even the gems and precious metals that were so easy for the dragons to coax up out of the earth, for most of those things that they now depended on the Traders and Iron People for.

Don't depend on that egg to hatch just yet, Keman, he warned himself. Report to Shana first. It's more important to get to the point where we 've got an agreement with this Kyrtian that will prevent him and the army from coming after us!

Their relief party arrived just then, two stripling humans that had been recruited from the ranks of the gladiators and looked it—muscled everywhere, including between their ears. They presented themselves with the proper password, and he and Dora gratefully surrendered their arms to the new sentries and plodded down the hill to their own campsite. They had man¬aged to make themselves unpopular, not by unpleasant behav¬ior, but simply by being unfriendly and taciturn. No one disliked them, but no one wanted to associate with them either. Humans, in Keman's experience, when away from their famil¬iar surroundings, needed to socialize. When any particular hu¬man offered a cold shoulder, he was generally shut out tacitly.

So Keman and Dora had a little fire to themselves; they un¬dertook their duties in silence, and now they collected their ra¬tions from the common camp-kitchen without comment beyond a grunt or a nod. They brought their food back to their camp, and to all appearances settled down to their belated dinners.

Ah, but beneath the surface, thoughts were flying between them. They were, in fact, mostly finished with that rather mea¬ger (by draconic standards) meal, before the exchanges got be¬yond incredulous :Can you believe what he said?: and similar exclamations of astonishment.

:How soon tonight do you think Shana will try and make contact with us?: Dora asked at last. :We have to tell her about