Prisoner of Fate (40 page)

S
wift eased onto her stomach on a flat slab between two walls on the second floor of a ruined building and waited. A small, long-legged yellow-banded spider crept from a crack in the slab and she watched it wander towards her arm.
Nice timing
, she mused, irritated. As the spider made an exploratory touch, three men appeared in her field of vision, sauntering along a street in the late afternoon sunlight. One carried a weapon that looked like a thundermaker, but it was a model or type unfamiliar to her. The other two carried bags. All three wore baggy pants and shirts.
Not soldiers
, she observed thankfully. She gently eased her arm away from the curious spider, silently willing it to go about its business elsewhere so that she could observe the men without a distraction. The men stopped twenty paces from where she was secreted. The weapon bearer raised his thundermaker, took aim and fired. His friends patted him on the back and one trotted into the ruins, returning with a rabbit, which he held up for his colleagues’ approval before stuffing it into his bag. The thundermaker owner reloaded his weapon and the rabbit hunters resumed their stroll through the ruins.

Swift waited until the men were well gone before she climbed out of her eyrie and circled back towards the Khvech Daas ruin.

The rabbit hunters were a nuisance, but she was glad that they were not Kerwyn soldiers and she knew her friends would be grateful to learn her news. She was puzzled and annoyed by Meg’s overnight disappearance, however, especially because the old woman hadn’t told them where she was going and because almost a day had passed without her return. People like that could not be trusted.

She stopped beside a pile of rubble and leaned against the remnant of a wall, checking first for movement in the nearby ruins, and when she was certain she was alone, she sank to the ground despondently.
What is wrong with me
? she wondered, feeling the pangs of depression seeping through her body. ‘I want to go home,’ she muttered. She reflected on her outburst at Meg the previous day.
I never get angry like that
, she thought.
Killer Dagger warned me to push aside my emotions and I always have.

You didn’t when you spared Ella
, an inner voice argued.

I don’t kill innocents
, she replied.

Dagger would tell you there’s no such thing in this world.

Dagger is dead.

She rested her head in her hands and cleared her mind of the argument. The thundermaker echoed across the city.
I have to change what I do
, she reasoned.
Runner is wild. Jewel I can still save. First, I have to get home.

He carried a new pile of books from the shelves and put them on the desk before her. ‘How much do you want to know about the Demon Horsemen?’

‘Have you read all these books?’ Meg asked, looking up from an old Andrakian text.

Erin laughed. ‘I’ve been here for three hundred years with nothing else to do. You know how quickly we can read with the amber. I’ve read some of these books four times.’

‘Then which book should I read first? This one is just a historical account of the Dragonlord Wars.’

‘What are you trying to find out?’ he asked.

‘How to stop someone releasing the Demon Horsemen from Se’Treya.’

‘Ah, Se’Treya. I’ve read about it.’

‘I’ve been there,’ she said.

His eyes widened. ‘How?’

‘Using the amber,’ she replied. ‘Just like entering here.’

‘But how did you know what it looked like? You need a clear image of the place before you can go.’

‘A Ahmud Ki showed me in a dream.’

‘A Ahmud Ki? I know that name. Andrakis. He was involved in the Dragon Wars or something like that. He was an evil man, hungry for power.’ Erin headed for the shelves and returned carrying a thick leather-bound volume. ‘This is the chronicle of King Dylan, written by—’ He paused to scan the flyleaf. ‘It’s titled
The New History of Andrakis
and it was written by Jana Drycraefter. It has a lot of detail about A Ahmud Ki.’ He placed the book on top of the others on the table.

‘He wrote his own books,’ Meg said. ‘I read them in the Royal Shess library.’

‘There are copies here,’ Erin told her, turning to retrieve them.

‘No, leave them,’ she urged, finding the young man’s eagerness to fetch books annoyingly obsessive. ‘I’m interested in something in particular, but I’m not sure what it is.’

‘That’s a conundrum,’ he remarked. ‘Describe it.’

She described the canvas bag that she had originally found in the Royal museum and that the Seers were seeking, and as she finished she saw intense fascination spread across Erin’s face.

‘I know what it is!’ he declared. ‘At least, I think I know. Read this.’ He lifted
The New History of Andrakis
from the pile onto the tabletop, flipped it open and skimmed through a host of pages. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Read this part.’ He left the table and headed out of the room, saying, ‘There’s another volume worth reading as well. I’ll get it while you read that part.’

Meg let Erin depart before she settled to translating the page. She wrapped her hand around her amber crystal and focussed on the elegant writing.

Because Abreotan’s broken sword represented the war-riddled past for King Dylan and contained the terrible magic of the imprisoned Dragonlords, he called upon the Aelendyell Ieldran to lock it away so that no one could use it again. Furthermore, it was his wish that the hilt be locked in a nondescript canvas bag, so that he could store it in an undisclosed location and the bag would never attract attention as being of any worth. The Ieldran agreed. They combined their magic to weave a powerful spell on both the lock and the canvas so that no one could break open the lock or cut into the bag. Satisfied that the hilt was safe, King Dylan hid it in a place that only he knew, and the sword of Abreotan quickly slipped into mythology within the kingdom.

She skipped several pages and read:

King Dylan took an important piece of information to the grave upon his death—the whereabouts of the hilt of the legendary sword of Aian Abreotan. People searched the castle and the tunnels for years in the hope of finding the most powerful artefact in Andrakian history, but to this day no one has ever located the resting place of the canvas bag containing the hilt.

She looked up as Erin returned, carrying two slim volumes. ‘These are from two different places,’ he said, placing them on the table and opening the orange-covered book. ‘This one is an inventory from a trading merchant who plied the seas between Targa and Shess almost four centuries ago. Look at this entry.’ He pointed to a scrawl in the margin beside a list.

Meg read the list and the scrawl attached to one item:

‘1 canvas bag curio: this strange bag cannot be opened or punctured to our knowledge. Contents might be a sword hilt or similarly shaped object of worth.’

‘And this one,’ Erin continued as Meg finished reading, ‘is the diary of a Western Shess pirate, Dagger “Sheets” Wildwave. Read this entry.’

Again Meg read. The language was definitely Shessian, but it was an archaic style and she had to use the amber to get the full sense of the writing:

In the haul today we found a strange canvas bag that defied all sense. Try as we might we could not force the lock. Not knife, not sword, not fire harms the material.

It is an altogether bewitched object and one we will be well rid of to the king when the time comes to sell our goods.

‘How do you remember all these entries?’ she asked.

Erin smiled. ‘Some things are more interesting than others. The Ashuak society was built on the power of dragons, so I followed the dragon motif through a great many books and the Andrakian stories have a period more than a millennium past when dragons were significant.’

‘These entries tell me about the bag, but what happened to the sword blade?’ she asked.

Erin flipped pages over in
The New History of Andrakis
text. ‘This part here tells what you need to know,’ he said, stopping at a page. ‘It is very long, but if you want to understand the sword you need to read it.’

The vision of the white object just below the clouds coming towards the ruins held Swift’s attention for a long time. She’d seen airbirds floating on hot air above Port of Joy, but the apparition approaching the ancient city enthralled her because of its sheer size. Elongated like a fat sausage, with a black carriage suspended beneath the white fabric, it moved against the breeze until it reached the river near the old imperial palace where it hovered. Squinting because of the distance, she saw ropes drop from the carriage and then men slid down the ropes into the ruin. A few moments later, the gigantic airbird began to settle towards the earth.

For the second day, she had been searching through the city ruins to find some clue as to where the old woman had gone. Wahim, Chase and she had spent the previous night anticipating Meg’s return, but the woman did not reappear. ‘She’s abandoned us,’ Swift told her companions angrily when they woke. ‘I say we get out of this place and go home.’

‘What if she’s in trouble?’ Chase suggested. ‘She could have been captured by the rabbit hunters you saw.’

‘Then she shouldn’t have been out there on her own,’ Swift retorted. In the end, however, she agreed with Wahim and Chase to wait one more day and search for the old woman, but she was seething with so much anger when she left their makeshift base that she warned the other two not to stray far while she went out searching alone. They protested, but she made it clear that she was going alone because she was the only one who could scout efficiently and she had the only weapon.

She’d spent a long time searching among the ruins, so long that it was already midday. Chase and Wahim would be worried that she’d been gone so long, but now the unexpected arrival of the airbird drew her attention and she decided to get closer to the new phenomenon to find out what it meant. Choosing a path that would give her the shortest route back to the Khvech Daas if she needed to retreat, she ran towards the imperial palace.

A hundred paces from the ruin, she spotted people and dropped to the ground to roll behind a wall, her heart racing. Warily, she lifted her head. Kerwyn soldiers stood at attention, red uniforms contrasting sharply against the backdrop of the white airbird fabric augmented with a black dragon silhouette. Every soldier was equipped with a shiny thundermaker. She counted thirty men, plus a leader who strutted along the ranks, giving instructions that she couldn’t quite hear because of the distance. He began dividing them into squads of six, pointing in different directions, and one by one the squads fanned out from the palace. One squad started towards her. She crawled on her belly to a point where she judged she could rise without being seen, and sprinted away from the palace, weaving through the buildings until she reached a street that headed towards the Khvech Daas. Somehow the
Kerwyn had found them, but how? She sucked in her breath and ran.

‘How long before they get here?’ Chase asked.

‘Hard to tell,’ Swift said, still breathing hard from her run. ‘If they are thorough, they mightn’t get here until tomorrow or the day after. It’s a big area they are searching.’

‘I’d search the most obvious places first,’ Wahim said. ‘This is one.’

‘I just want to know how they knew we would be here,’ said Swift. ‘We’ve travelled a long way. Who told them?’

‘Meg?’ Chase asked, guessing at his sister’s insinuation. ‘How? And why?’

‘Doesn’t make sense,’ said Wahim. ‘She was the one who brought us here. She could have turned us in when we were at her shop in Port of Joy if she wanted.’

Swift bit her lip and nodded. ‘No. You’re right. So who else knew we were coming here?’

‘No one,’ said Chase, ‘unless—’

‘Passion.’ Wahim’s statement was met with stunned silence.

Chase clenched his fists and groaned. ‘I shouldn’t have left her there. We should have stayed.’

Swift reached for his arm, saying, ‘If we had stayed, we would already be in the Bog Pit. Or worse.’

‘Bastards!’ Chase yelled and kicked the ground. ‘Kerwyn bastards!’

‘Calm down,’ Swift urged, turning him towards her. ‘There’s nothing you can do now. You have to be strong.’

‘My sister!’ Chase moaned and sank to the ground. ‘I should have stayed.’ He curled into a ball and sobbed. Swift and Wahim squatted beside Chase, and as Swift stroked Chase’s heaving shoulder Wahim looked at her
and asked, ‘So what will we do?’ His question was answered by a series of distant shots that echoed through the ruins.

Meg closed the book and stared again at the curved symbols on a yellow, stained parchment that had fallen from the book. What she had learned in the readings about the object locked inside the canvas bag made it very clear why the Seers did not want it to be placed in the wrong hands. Wrought by the Elvenaar, the blade imbued with Aelendyell blood and the hilt clustered with chunks of amber from the Genesis Stone, it was a dragon-slaying weapon that gave unlimited magical power to whoever wielded it. Designed to be the nemesis of any creature constructed from or reliant on the amber magic, the sword had decided the outcome of the ancient war between the Dragonlords, the Elvenaar and humans when it was wielded by Aian Abreotan, and a thousand years after Abreotan’s victory, King Dylan used the sword to defeat the last surviving Dragonlord, Mareg Dru’Artha Sutnavanistra. The Demon Horsemen, if A Ahmud Ki was right, were magical constructs created by Mareg and the one weapon that could defeat them was Abreotan’s sword—in the right hands.

But whose hands
? she wondered as she stared at the parchment.
Who could wield such a weapon
? And she pondered another problem. The sword was broken, the blade shattered cataclysmically by Dylan who had believed, wrongly, that it was the only key to Se’Treya. Who could reforge the blade?

‘Did you find your answer?’ Erin asked, entering the chamber.

She looked up and rose from the chair. ‘I know why the canvas bag is so valuable,’ she said. ‘I just don’t know what to do with it.’