The Rise And Fall Of A Dragonking Part 1

THE RISE AND FALL OF A DRAGON KING.

by Lynn Abbey

CHAPTER ONE.

Nameless stars sparkled in the sky above the ancient city of Urik, casting a pale light on its black velvet fields, silver silk waterways, and the firelight jewels of its encircling market villages. On the towering walls of the mile-square city, a score of bas-relief sculptures stood guard in shadow grays and black, each an image of Sorcerer-King Hamanu, the Lion of Urik. With a sword in one hand and a scepter in the other, he kept watch over his domain.

A score of bright, sulphurous eyes looked out from the walls of Urik, bright motes of singular, unmistakable color in the chill, midnight air. Their light could be seen a day's journey beyond the irrigated fields. The eyes were beacons for honest travelers who journeyed during the cooler nighttime hours and warnings to covetous adventurers: The Lion of Urik never sleeps, never closes his eyes. King Hamanu's city could not be taken by surprise or pried from his pitiless grasp.

Within the city's walls, where the gemstone eyes did not shine, men and women wearing tunics of a similar sulphur color kept their king's laws, their king's peace, which should have been a simple enough task. Urik did not have many laws and they rarely, if ever, changed. King Hamanu's curfew had not changed since it was decreed a thousand years ago: Between the appearance of the tenth star after sundown and the start of the next day, no citizen-man or woman, child or slave-was allowed to set foot on the king's streets. By starlight, there should have been nothing for the king's templars to watch except each other.

But since the dawn of time-long before the Lion-King bestrode Urik's walls-the laws kings made applied only to the law-abiding folk of their domains. Wise kings made laws that wise folk willingly obeyed. Wiser kings learned that no net of laws could govern everyone beneath them, nor should they strive to do so. King Hamanu let the pots of Urik simmer nightly, and in a thousand years, they had boiled over no more than a handful of times.

"Halt!" the yellow-robed templar commanded as he separated himself from a clot of similarly clad men and women. Here, within spitting distance of Urik's Elven Market, King Hamanu's minions coagulated for their own safety, traveling in threes and fours, rarely in pairs, never alone-especially at night.

The pair of mul slaves bearing a pole-slung sedan chair came to an easy-gaited halt that did not jostle their pa.s.senger. Four slave torchbearers arranged themselves in a diamond pattern around them. The muls set the chair gently on the cobblestones. They slipped the hardwood poles out of the carriage braces, then stood at attention, each resting a pole against his ma.s.sively muscled left-side shoulder.

"Who breaks the king's curfew?" the templar demanded. The severity of his tone was belied by the continuing conversation of his peers beside him.

The lead torchbearer, a half-elf of singularly unpleasant appearance, looked down on the human templar with fourth-rank hemst.i.tching in his left sleeve. "O Mighty One, we bear my lord Ursos," she answered confidently.

She had had no accent, save for the common accent of Urik, until she spoke her master's name with the distinctive drawl of far-off Draj. It beggared imagination that a Drajan lord would travel the curfewed streets of Urik-especially these anarchic times since the Dragon's demise and the simultaneous disappearance of King Hamanu's Drajan counterpart, Tectukt.i.tlay.

The templar scowled. Whoever rode in the sedan chair, his name-or her name-wasn't likely Ursos.

"By whose leave does Lord Ursos break curfew?" he continued.

The half-elf shifted her torch to her left hand. She was unarmed, as were her five companions: slaves were, by Hamanu's law, unarmed. By law, all citizens, including lords who traveled in sedan chairs, were unarmed. Weapons were the templars' prerogative. The fourth-rank templar carried a staff not quite half as long as the muls' hardwood poles, and the half-elf's torch bore an uncanny resemblance to a gladiator's club, down to the leather wrapping on its haft and the egg-shaped killing stone lashed to its base.

He repeated himself, "By whose leave does your lord break curfew?" loudly and somewhat anxiously.

His wall-leaning peers at last abandoned their conversation. The slave's right arm disappeared in folds of her funnel-shaped sleeve. There was a moment of thick tension in the moonlight until it reappeared with a small leather pouch, which the templar pa.s.sed to one of his companions for examination.

"By your your leave, O Mighty One." leave, O Mighty One."

"It's all here," the inspecting templar announced, extracting two metallic pieces from the pouch before pa.s.sing it to the templar beside him.

"The lion watch over you, then, and your lord," the first templar said as he retreated.

"And over you, O Mighty One," the slave replied, as much a curse as a blessing.

The sedan chair and its escort stopped short of the Elven Market. Without hesitation, the party turned and disappeared into an alley whose existence couldn't have been discerned with the light of a score of pitch-soaked torches, much less the four they carried. Some distance into the cramped darkness, they stopped again. The half-elf rapped once on a hollow, drumlike door, and a rectangle of ruddy lantern light suddenly surrounded them. The muls carried the sedan chair across the threshold. The escort extinguished their torches and closed the door behind them.

Inside the vestibule, a person emerged from the chair. With his face obscured by an unadorned mask and his body swaddled in a drab cloak, it was easier to say what race Lord Ursos wasn't-not dwarf or mul, not halfling, nor full-grown elf-than what race he might be.

The ragged, menial slave who'd opened the door had run away when he saw the escorted sedan chair. He returned with another slave, of higher status, who was clad in pale, translucent linen that left no doubt about her s.e.x. With a soft voice, she showed the escort where to leave the sedan chair, and then directed them down a corridor, to a door that provided discreet entrance to a boisterous tavern. When the escort was gone, the vestibule was once again silent-a silence so sudden and absolute one might suspect magic in the air. Without breaking that silence, the slave led the masked Lord Ursos down a narrow stairway to a curtained doorway. She bowed low before the curtain and swept her arm gracefully toward it, but made no move to pa.s.s between the rippling lengths of silk.

Lord Ursos strode past her, removing the drab cloak with one hand and the mask with the other as he swept through the silk into the upper gallery of an underground amphitheater. He was a lean, sinewy human, with the sunken features of a man who'd indulged his every pa.s.sion, yet survived. With the casual contempt of an aristocrat, the lord held out his drab outer garments for a slave at the top of the amphitheater stairs. The slave hesitated, his arms half-extended.

"My lord," he whispered anxiously. "Who are-?" The slave caught himself; slaves did not ask such questions. "Do you-?" And caught himself again, in evident despair. No one, not even an elegant lord, entered this place without an invitation.

Lord Ursos understood. Smiling indulgently, he gestured with a dancer's swift grace. When he was finished, he held a delicate, star-shaped ceramic token between the tips of his thumb and forefinger.

"Ah-" The slave returned a smile as the token dropped into his hand. He relaxed audibly, visibly. "Your place is prepared, my lord. If my lord will simply follow me-?"

A place was indeed prepared, a place in the front row, along the rail, overlooking a circular pit floored with dark sand that sparkled in the light of wall-mounted torches. Another slave, who'd followed them down the amphitheater's steep, stair-cut ramp, offered the lord a shallow bowl filled with a thick, glistening fluid. The lord refused with another dancerlike gesture, and the bowl-bearer hurried away.

"My lord," the first slave began, his eyes lowered and his hands trembling. "Is there-? Would you prefer... a pipe, perhaps, or another beverage, a different beverage?"

"Nothing."

The lord's voice was deeper than the slave had expected; he retreated, stumbling, and barely regained his balance.

A certain type of man might come to this place for its entertainments, having paid handsomely in gold for the privilege. All the other men in the amphitheater-there were a score of guests, with several races represented, but no women among them-clutched bowls between their hands and metal sipping straws likewise gripped between their teeth. Their faces were slack, their eyes wide and fixed. A man who disdained the sipping bowl or the dream-pipe was a rare guest, a disturbing guest.

The second slave could not meet this guest's eyes again.

"Leave me," the lord commanded, and, gratefully, the slave escaped, his sandals slapping with unseemly vigor on the stairs.

The lord settled on the upholstered bench to which his token ent.i.tled him and waited patiently as another handful of guests arrived and were escorted to their appropriate places. Then, while the latecomers sucked and sipped, a door opened in the wall of the pit. Slaves entered first, wrestling a rack of bells and cymbals through the sand. Before the melodic discord faded, a quartet of musicians entered, swaddled completely in black and apparent only as velvet darkness on the sparkling sand.

Antic.i.p.ation gripped the guests. Someone dropped his bowl. The clash of pottery shards echoed through the amphitheater, bringing hisses of disapproval from other guests, though not from the patient, empty-handed lord seated along the rail.

Another door opened, larger than the first, spreading a rectangle of ruddy light across the pit. The polished bra.s.s bells and cymbals cast fiery reflections among the guests, who ignored them. Nothing could draw their attention from the three low-wheeled carts being trundled onto the sand. An upright post of mekillot bone rose from each cart, a crossbar was lashed to each post, and a living mortal-two women and a man-was lashed to each crossbar, arms spread wide, as if in flight.

One of the women moaned as the wheels of her cart churned into the sand. Her strength failed. She sagged against the bonds holding her to the post and bar. The t.i.tillating scent of abject terror rose from the pit; patient Lord Ursos was patient no longer. He pushed back his sleeves and set his elbows upon the rail.

When the carts were set, the slaves departed, and the musicians struck a single tone: flute, lyre, bells, and cymbals together. It was a perfectly pitched counterpoint to the woman's moan. The fine hairs on the lord's bare arms rose in expectation as the night's master strode silently across the sand.

There were no words of introduction or explanation. None were needed. Everyone in the amphitheater-from the slaves in the top row of the gallery to those in the pit, especially those unfortunates bound against bone in the pit-knew what would happen next.

The night's master drew a little, curved knife from the depths of his robe. Its blade was steel, more precious than gold, and it gleamed in the torchlight when he brandished it for the guests. Then he angled it carefully, and its reflection illuminated a small portion of the bound man's flank. The prisoner gasped as the first cuts were made, one on either side of a floating rib, and howled as the master slowly peeled back his flesh. The lyrist took the first improvisation in the time-honored manner, weaving the middle tones together, leaving the highs for the chimes and the lows for the flute.

Brandishing his knife a second time, the master made a second, smaller, gash across the b.l.o.o.d.y stream. He dipped his free hand in a pouch below his waist and smeared a white, crystalline powder into the new wound. The bound man gasped and strained against the crossbar. Tinkling cymbals framed his thin, close-mouthed wail, and the flutist blew a haunting note to unite them.

The bare-armed lord sat back from the rail. His sleeves fell, disregarded, back to his wrists as his eyes closed and his hands folded into fists. His breath came rapidly as the melody took shape in music and mortal suffering. The tones were too potent for some of the guests around him; they added their own whimpering harmonies to the night master's music. Symphony and empathy together sent a shiver along the lord's spine. But the shiver died before it reached his throat, and he alone, except for the master, remained silent.

The melody continued to evolve, not attaining its final form until the three captives were bleeding, weeping, and wailing: an eight-tone trope, four ascending, then the lowest, followed by a three-tone cascade through the middle range.

The dark pa.s.sion of the night master's music quieted the lord's restless thoughts and gave him a moment of peace, but, born from mortal flesh as it was, the melody ended all too soon. One by one the captive voices failed. Where there had been music, only meat remained. The master departed, and then the musicians, the guests, and the slaves, also, until the lord was alone.

Utterly alone.

His lips parted, and music, at last, rose from his throat: an eight-tone trope, four ascending, then the lowest, followed by a three-tone cascade through the middle range.

Much later, when all but Urik's rowdiest taverns had fallen into a stupor and templars drowsed against their spears, the midnight peace of one humble dwelling-a tiny room tucked beneath roof-ribs, broiling by day and frigid by night-was broken by an infant's angry squalling. The mother, sleeping on a rag-and-rope bed beside her man, awoke at once, but kept her eyes squeezed shut, as if sheer denial or force of will could quiet her unhappy daughter.

It was a futile hope. Tooth fever, that's what the infant's malady was called by the widowed crones, who sat all day beside the neighborhood wellhead. The baby would cry until her teeth came in and the swelling in her gums subsided. Both mother and daughter were lucky to have gotten any sleep at all.

"Do something," the man grumbled, rolling away from her, taking her blanket with him to pile over his ears.

He was a good man: never drank, never raised his voice or fist, but went out at dawn each morning and sweated all day in the kiln-blast of his uncle's pottery. He was afraid of his daughter, astonished that something so pale and delicate would, if Fortune's wheel were as round and true as his uncle's, someday call him Father. He wanted to do well by his offspring, but now, when all she needed was warm hands and a swaying shoulder, he was reduced to surly helplessness. So, the woman swung her legs over the side and swept her tangled hair out of her eyes.

There was light in the room. She silently cursed herself for leaving the lamp lit. An open flame was a danger to them-her man and her daughter and every other mortal in the neighborhood. It was also a waste of oil, a waste of money, which was scant these days, with her unable to work. In the instant before her vision cleared, the mother saw disaster in her mind's eye: her man, groggy because he hadn't slept and clumsy for the same reason, blundering against the kiln, screaming, and dooming them all to poverty, to death.

With that image fresh in her thoughts, she was too distracted to cry out when she saw another woman-a stranger-sitting on the stool beside her daughter's cradle. She reached blindly for the lamp, which was not lit. The light came from the stranger; it surrounded her and the infant.

"Lame..."

That word, her man's name, came weakly from the mother's tongue. It failed to rouse Lame, but drew the attention of the dark-haired stranger whose eyes, when she turned, were huge in her face and gray as the infant's.

"Rest you, now," the stranger said in a sweet and gentle twilight voice. "Rest you... Cissa. Come the sun and your daughter's pain will be gone."

"Yes," Cissa agreed slowly. A part of her was caught in panic: a stranger in her home, a stranger holding her daughter. A stranger whom Cissa would have remembered if she'd ever seen her before, a stranger who sat bathed in light that had no source. "Lame-" she called more strongly than before. "Larne."

"Rest you, both," the stranger insisted. "The child is safe with me."

"Safe," Cissa repeated. The stranger's smile wrapped its arms around her and vanquished her panic. "Safe. Yes, safe."

"None in Urik is safer," the stranger agreed, and Cissa, at last, believed.

She returned to the rumpled bed where her man's warm shadow beckoned.

The radiant, gray-eyed stranger gave her attention back to the infant. She was not one for gurgly noises or nonsense syllables or mimicking a kank's jointed antennae with her fingers. She charmed the pained and weary child with a wordless lullaby.

The infant's fists unclenched. Her little furrowed face relaxed when the stranger stroked her down-covered scalp. The child reached for a thick lock of the stranger's midnight hair. They shared a trilling note of laughter, and then the stranger sang again-an eight-tone trope, four ascending, then the lowest, then a three-tone cascade through the middle range-theme and variations until the tooth had risen and the infant slept easy in a stranger's arms.

He began his journey when the air was cool and the day no more than a bright promise above the eastern rooftops. With his bowl tucked inside his tattered, skimpy tunic and his crutch wedged beneath his shoulder, he made his way from the alley where he slept, safe and warm beneath a year's acc.u.mulation of rubbish, to the northwest corner of Joiner's Square. The baker's shop on that corner had a stoop that was shaded all day and wider than its door-wide enough for a crippled beggar to sit, plying the trade he'd never chosen to master. He inconvenienced no one, especially Nouri, the baker, who sometimes let him scrounge crumbs off the floor at the end of the day.

It was a long journey from his alley to the baker's shop, and a treacherous one. The least mistake planting his crutch among the cobblestones would throw him off his unsteady feet. He was careful, wriggling the crutch a bit each time he set it down before entrusting it with his weight and balance.

When he was sure of it, he'd grip the shaft in both hands and then-holding his breath, always holding his breath for that risky moment-hop his good leg forward. Then he'd drag his crippled leg, his aching, useless leg, afterward.

His shoulder hurt worse than the leg by the time he could see the baker's stoop ahead of him. The beggar-king to whom he paid his dues said he should forego the crutch, said he'd live longer and earn more if he dragged himself along with his arms. And it might come to that. Some days the sun was noon-high before the numbness in his arm subsided from his morning journey. He had pride, though. He'd stand and walk as best he could until he had no choice, and then, maybe, he'd simply choose to die.

But not today.

"Hey, cripple-boy! Slow down, cripple-boy."

A handful of gravel came with the greeting. He shook it off and planted his crutch in the next likely spot. He couldn't slow down, not without stopping entirely; didn't dare twist around to count his tormentors. Bullies, he knew from long experience, seldom went alone.

"Hey, cripple-boy! I'm talkin' to you, cripple-boy!"

"Cripple-boy-what's the difference between you an' a snake?"

There were three of them, he had that knowledge before a meaty hand clamped across the back of his neck and shook him hard.

"Snakes don't die till sundown, cripple-boy, but you're gonna die now." now."

He hit the cobblestones with his crutch in his hands, for all the good it would do him. He didn't recognize them, certainly hadn't ever done them any harm. That wouldn't matter. They were predators; he was prey. It was as simple as that, and as quick. There was an alley behind him, and though a whole man would undoubtedly say that its shadows and debris would work to a predator's advantage, not his, he dragged himself toward it, still clinging to his crutch.

The trio behind were whole men and able to see advantage in the alley. The nearest wrested the crutch away while the other two seized the beggar by the hair and belt and threw him bodily into the alley's deep shadows.

Nouri couldn't have said what drew him out of his shop's oven-filled courtyard and put him at the counter at just that moment. Perhaps he'd had a reason and forgotten it. Dawn was the end of his day. His customers were workmen, laborers who bought their bread first thing in the morning, ate what they needed, and took the crusts home to feed their families when their work was done. Perhaps, though, it was the Lion's whim: an urge of fortune best blamed on Urik's mighty king. Either way, or something else entirely, Nouri was behind the counter, staring out the open door, when the adolescent thugs seized the beggar.

His beggar. beggar.

Father had always said a beggar was good for business-a polite and clean beggar with an obvious but not hideous deformity. The crippled boy was all that, and more: His wits weren't afflicted. He kept an eye on the street, an open ear for pa.s.sing conversation, for thieves and thugs and, on occasion, profit.

If the boy had ever asked, Nouri would have given him a nighttime place beneath the counter. But the boy was proud, in his way; he wouldn't take charity, not above his place on the stoop or a few broken crusts of bread.

Nouri was always a bit relieved when he heard the boy thump and settle on the stoop. Urik was a dangerous place for anyone who didn't have a door to lock himself behind. In his heart, Nouri had known that the morning would come when the beggar wouldn't appear. But he hadn't imagined the boy would come to his end not fifty paces from his shop's stoop.

The tools of Nouri's trade hung on the wall behind him. Not least among them was the wedge-shaped mallet he used to beat down the risen dough between kneadings; it could be used for beating down other things... murderous young thugs who thought a crippled boy was fair game.

Nouri's wife, Maya, and his three journeymen were in courtyard unloading the oven. Maya would have stopped him if she'd seen him with the mallet in his hand, heading out the door. And the journeymen would have been some a.s.surance of his own safety: he was bigger than any of the youths, but not all of them together. If he'd taken the time to think at all, he might well have thought better of justice. Urik had enough beggars, and his stoop was an attractive place for their trade; he'd have another soon enough. Nouri wasn't a templar or a thug; he'd never struck a man in anger, not even his apprentices, who deserved a beating now and again.

But Nouri didn't stop to think. He crossed the street and charged down the alley at a flat-out run. With a backhand swing of the mallet, he caught the laggard of the trio from behind. The youth went down with a shout that alerted his companions, the biggest of whom was also the closest. Paste-faced with fear, the thug tried to defend himself with the crippled boy's crutch, but the weight of Nouri's mallet swept the lighter shaft aside.

The baker delivered a blow that shattered teeth and released a spray of blood and saliva from the thug's mouth. Nouri was defenseless and vulnerable in the wake of the violence he'd done, but the third thug didn't linger to press his advantage. The last youth hied himself out of the alley without a backward glance for his bloodied and fallen companions.

"Get out," Nouri suggested in a voice he scarcely recognized as his own. "Get out now, and don't show your faces around here again."

It was good advice, and b.l.o.o.d.ymouth retained the wit to take it. He hauled his stunned companion to his feet, and with arms linked around each other for support, they beat a clumsy retreat to the street.

With his free hand, Nouri retrieved the undamaged crutch. Aside from his own pounding pulse and ragged breathing, there were no other sounds in the alley, no other movements. Nothing at all to say he wasn't alone.

"Boy?" he called into the shadows. "Janni?" He thought that was the boy's name; you you or or boy boy were usually sufficient to get his attention when he sat on the stoop. "Don't be afraid, boy. Are you hurt, boy?" were usually sufficient to get his attention when he sat on the stoop. "Don't be afraid, boy. Are you hurt, boy?"

Then, fearing the worst-that he'd been too late-Nouri set down both mallet and crutch. He waded into the shadows and began flinging rubbish aside before familiar sounds snared his attention: tap, thump, tap, thump, and and drag; tap, thump, drag; tap, thump, and and drag drag again. The cold hand of fear clutched the baker's heart as he turned toward the light and the street. again. The cold hand of fear clutched the baker's heart as he turned toward the light and the street.