Christopher Rowley - Bazil 02 - A Sword For A Dragon

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2024-12-24 0 0 771.98KB 394 页 5.9玖币
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PROLOGUE
It was when the bishop found a dead child talking to him, just before a
funeral service in the House of Auros in the city of Dzu that he knew he
could not escape.
At night the eyes bore into him, like lancing points of fire from the
dark. His allegiance was demanded. His beliefs made a mockery of. A
voice whispered in his dreams.
And it was true, and he knew it. His faith was gone. There was no
Auros, no benevolent center of the world. Even the House of Auros in
tumbledown Dzu was a fraud. It was, in fact, the ancient Temple of the
serpent god, Sephis. It had been turned over to the priests of Auros a few
centuries before, when Sephis lost his hold upon Ourdh and the tyrant rule
of Dzu was thrown down.
But the bishop of Auros in Dzu had dabbled in the Dark Arts. He had
delved in the black books of the Masters. He had begun experiments. To
escape censure from a disastrous situation involving a monkey, a highborn
young woman, and an attempt to exchange their consciousnesses, he had
taken a terrible oath to the mystery man who had saved him from
disaster.
Now they had come to him for their payment.
The dead child refused to be buried. It lingered in the bishop’s
chambers.
“They are waiting for you,” it announced. It led him to the front door of
the Temple.
The skull-faced man who called himself the high priest, Odirak, was
waiting, accompanied by a man hidden in a voluminous black cloak.
Behind this figure came a girl of perhaps seventeen years, wearing nothing
but a cotton shift. She was slack-mouthed, benumbed by an enchantment.
The bishop let them into the House of Auros and then opened the heavy
gate that shut away the basement. They went down into the great
chamber of the pit, and the man in the cloak pulled back his hood. The
bishop quailed. The man’s face ended at the nose, all below was a
glistening expanse of horn. The pale, naked scalp rose above eyes that
were like windows onto a place of fire.
The dead child giggled, and the bishop’s skin crawled.
The bishop knew that this was a Mesomaster, most powerful of all the
acolytes of the Masters themselves. Never had the bishop dreamed that he
might come to this pass.
With harsh phrases of power, the thing summoned a Black Mirror out
of nothingness. It hung there in the air, a gleaming circle in which the
grey shining backwash of chaos surged. At the Mesomaster’s command,
the mirror floated downward and arranged itself at knee height. The girl
lay down, her eyes, mercifully, were quite blank. The dead child held a
razor in its hand.
The bishop thought back to his disastrous experiment. What a fool he
had been! Once again he wondered if he had been guided to the black arts,
whether the enemy had known of some weakness in him that could be
worked on to finally trap him.
The dead child slit the girl’s throat, and tilted her head to spread her
blood across the non-surface of the Black Mirror. It smoked and stank,
and while it smoked the Mesomaster recited a terrible chant.
Something coalesced in the darkness within the Black Mirror.
Surrounded in a halo of fractionalized sparks, the thing grew larger.
Twisting motions writhed in the clouds of chaos.
The Mesomaster stepped back. From the mirror there came a gush of a
thick green vapor that spilled out and rolled across the floor of the pit like
a liquid, slowly filling it to knee height.
Light blazed suddenly from a point within the vapor. Something began
to rise out of the vapor and take solid form. It was a dark green at first,
but slowly it became golden and the surface took on a pattern of scales.
At length a great golden serpent coiled upon the floor and looked down
upon them with huge expressionless eyes like portholes into nothingness.
The god Sephis was reborn, a malacostracan demon from another,
darker world.
CHAPTER ONE
Dragoneer First Class Relkin of Quosh could think of many better ways
of spending a precious four-week leave, but he had made a promise to his
dragon. And so he found himself in a chill spring downpour, standing
under a twisted pine tree on the slopes of Mt. Ulmo, staring out over an
alpine meadow that was cloaked in cold fog.
It had rained for days. Relkin was damp, even under his Kenor freecoat
with its thick waxed outer surface, which was proof against any single
rain. He sighed audibly.
A tall, dark mass was visible in the meadow, a dragon, also in rain gear,
with a waterproof mantle pulled around his neck keeping off the worst of
the downpour.
They had been there for hours—the whole day to be precise, not to
mention the day before and the day before that. In fact, they’d been
coming to this forlorn spot for a full two weeks, and apart from the very
first day, it had been just like this, cold, wet, and absolutely miserable.
There’d been nothing to eat but cold jerky and oats for a week, no
company except a sulky dragon, and not even a fire since everything in the
woods was soaked through and beyond the powers of even such a good fire
starter as Relkin Orphanboy.
Worst of all was the knowledge that with a four-week leave, they could
have gone much farther afield, perhaps all the way back to the coastal
cities, where Relkin could have solved his biggest problem. Since he was
under the age of sixteen, he was too young to be let into the military
brothels, and General Paxion had made the morals of dragonboys and
young soldiers alike a priority of his stewardship of Fort Dal-housie.
Freelance trollops caught working outside the legal brothels were likely to
get military justice, which had just about eliminated them from the
district. Thus almost all opportunities for a fast maturing dragonboy to
learn more of the mysteries of sex had disappeared. Of course, there were
girls in the town, on nearby farms, and even in the fort, but their parents
would not have them mixing with dragonboys, oh no, not for a moment.
Dragonboys were all orphans, the dregs of the coastal cities, and who
wanted such landless trash mixing with one’s daughters? Not the good
citizenry of Dalhousie, that was for sure, even though those same good
citizens depended on the courage and tenacity of those very same boys in
battle.
A quick trip to the coast, to Marneri or even Talion, would have made
all the difference. They could have taken a riverboat to Razac and then
gone down the coast road. He could have done something about this
obsession with the opposite sex, and they could both have enjoyed some
warmer weather for a week or two, which would have made a fine antidote
to the long hard winter they’d endured while attached to the 87th Marneri
Dragons out at Fort Kenor.
Situated on the north flank of Mt. Kenor, overlooking the great river
and the western plains, Fort Kenor was easily the least comfortable of all
the forts in Kenor. The winds that ripped down the Gan from the High
Plateau of Hazog were cold enough to go through two wool shirts and a
freecoat with a fur lining.
But a promise was a promise, and dragons possessed keener memories
than either men or elephants, so there was no getting out of it. And so he
was here, watching a cold, wet, sulky dragon standing out there in the
meadow waiting for the love of his life to fly in.
And, of course, there was no sign of her, nothing to indicate that a silky
green dragoness was coming to this meadow high above the forest of
Tunina.
Relkin had heard the story many times, of course. Whenever Bazil had
had a barrel of beer or two. So he knew that on this very spot, Baz had
fought the mighty wild dragon, the Purple Green of Hook Mountain, and
won the favor of the green female. And that Baz was by now the male
parent of one or more young dragons, crossbreeds between the wild and
the wingless wyverns of Argonath. And finally that the lithe green female
would return to meet Bazil when the young ones were hatched.
Alas, the wild female dragon had not come, and it didn’t look as though
she was going to appear. Relkin would have a grouchy dragon on his
hands for weeks to come. He sighed. It was enough to make a young man
want to scream.
He looked up and noticed that the murk was darkening. The rain was
falling more heavily than ever. He knew they’d never get a fire going, just
another cold meal and then spend another miserable night sleeping under
a rock overhang.
The big shape moved. Relkin shifted position. His right leg had almost
gone to sleep. He shook it to dispel the pins and needles. Baz was giving up
for the day. Relkin thanked the old gods and then reflexively begged the
Great Mother’s pardon. Relkin was hopelessly mixed up when it came to
religion.
The dragon’s demeanor was subdued when he drew close. “She will not
come, I know this now,” he said in a mournful voice.
Relkin kept quiet. It was better not to say anything. The dragon put out
a huge arm and rested a well-trimmed set of claws on the boy’s shoulder
for a moment. A light touch, remarkable in a two-ton beast.
“Agh, it is all a waste! I am sorry boy, I one foolish dragon. She will not
come.”
Relkin continued to keep a diplomatic silence, and together they groped
their way back through the sopping wet woods to the overhang.
Woods rats had found their food. The jerky was ripped to pieces and
scattered. The oats and wheat biscuit had been gnawed and ruined. Worst
of all, the pot of akh had been licked completely clean. Relkin salvaged a
few fragments for a meal. The dragon ate a pound of unspoiled oats and
the rest of the jerky. Neither did much to stave off the pangs of hunger.
It rained all night.
In the morning, it was still raining and colder than ever. Relkin awoke
and found Bazil already up and working on the edge of his new sword, a
military issue blade with no name, just the number six hundred and
twenty-seven.
“It is over,” he said with a dragon finality that was absolute. “We go
back today. I will come again next year. If she lives, then I know she will
come then.”
Relkin shivered. “Next year? You want to come back here and do this
again?”
“Boy not have to come! Dragon come alone!”
“It might come to that,” muttered Relkin, though both knew he would
never let his charge out of his sight for so long.
Bazil finished with the sword and held it up, rain splattering off the
blue steel.
“Bah, this sword is clumsy, stupid. I do not want to fight with it.”
Relkin had been hearing complaints about the sword, a straightforward
military blade, almost eight feet long, ever since it had been presented to
Brazil the previous summer.
For months, in fact, Relkin had been secretly saving silver to buy his
dragon a new and better blade, but the cost was enormous. Such a weapon
represented a year’s salary, and Relkin had a long way to go before he
could approach one of the armorers at Fort Dal-housie and make a down
payment on one of the lovely blades that hung at the rear of their shops.
Bazil stood up and swung the sword, the steel whistling through the air
and slicing off the tops of a couple of unfortunate saplings. With a final
grumble, he sheathed the blade and picked around in the remains of the
oat sack for a handful of grain.
In a sullen mood, and with bellies rumbling from hunger, they
descended the hemlock-clad slopes of Mt. Ulmo. At the river Argo, which
had risen to a torrent because of the incessant rain, the only ferry was
reluctant to cross to the small town of Sutsons Camp.
They had to wait on the north side of the river, where there was nothing
except a few battered huts used by local fishermen. They were fortunate in
one thing: there were some fishermen there who’d had a reasonable catch
the day before. So while they spent another miserable night, Relkin inside
one of the verminous, smoky huts and Bazil bivouacked under a fishing
boat pulled up on the shore, they at least had several quarts of a hot fish
stew in their bellies.
The following morning, the rain gave up at last and was replaced with a
freezing wind from the northwest, “Hazog Breath” it was called up on the
cold-stone ramparts of Fort Kenor. Relkin and Baz waited disconsolately,
sitting in front of a small fire. At lunch, they bought more fish soup from
the fishermen. It was considerably thinner than it had been and did little
to appease their hunger. Relkin was so subdued by cold and hunger that
he scarcely argued with the fishermen about the quality of the soup.
The afternoon wore on, cold and colder. An occasional dark cloud flew
past. The river continued in spate.
Then at last, just before dusk, they spied a sail and soon afterward
cheered the arrival of a large trading boat, the Tench, captained by one
Polymus Karpone.
Dragon and boy signaled frantically to the trader, and she set her sails
to come around and fight the current, cross the stream, and picks them
up.
The Tench was a two-masted brig with a shallow draught and a mobile
keel. She was purposely built for the river trade and able to get in close to
almost any shore.
Her captain was a bald, full-bellied man who wore a weathered suit of
black fusgeen. His ruddy face was creased, and he most often had his pipe
protruding from the corner of his mouth.
“What accommodations have you for a dragon and a dragoneer?” asked
Relkin when they’d been hauled aboard.
“You can have the front quarter of my forward hold. It’s a little tight,
but it’s warm down there and it’s dry. Plenty of hay. We’ve taken dragons
before this. Where are you headed?”
“Port Dalhousie.”
“Well, that’ll cost one silver groat apiece…”
“Two groats! To get from here to Dalhousie? That’s extortion! One
groat will suffice.”
“One groat will buy only the cold collation, which is essentially bread.”
Relkin scowled. “What are the hot items on the menu?”
“There is a venison pie, we took on several of them at Argo Landing.
And there is the fish chowder, our chef is an expert on the chowder.”
“Forget the chowder, we have eaten little but chowder for the last day
or so.”
“Then it must be two groats. A dragon will eat one entire pie, not to
mention dumplings.”
“Do you have akh?”
“We have the best akh from Jemins and Sveet, who are famous for all
their bottled sauces. You must know the name.”
“The dragon is fond of akh, especially on the dumplings.”
“He can have all the dumplings he wants, but it must be two silver
groats. One of those pies is a penny’s worth on its own.”
Relkin looked to Bazil who shrugged. The captain opened the hatch
above the galley a crack, and a waft of hot air carried the delicious smells
of venison pies baking in the oven. Bazil groaned.
Relkin heaved a vast sigh. “Very well. It is far too much, but we are too
tired to argue. Two groats it is.”
The Tench pushed off and moved swiftly downriver. Bazil shed his
mantle and cape, and Relkin got out of his wet clothes and put on slightly
drier things from his pack, an undershirt of Marneri wool and some
brown breeches. Then he went in search of hot food.
In the galley, Relkin found a little man with a monk’s tonsure and a suit
of coarse brown wool sitting on a bench eating a plate of dumplings and
sauce. His trousers ended above the ankle and his feet, protected only by
skimpy sandals, seemed blue from the chill winds that whipped around
the deck. He seemed oblivious to the chill, however, happily murmuring to
himself as he ate.
When Relkin asked for more akh on Bazil’s pail of dumplings, the man
with the tonsure looked up with immediate interest.
“Excuse me young fellow,” he said. “Is it customary for people to eat
akh in this province?”
The man had a curious accent, Relkin could not place it at first. And it
was an outlandish idea, akh was a compound made of the hottest peppers,
the strongest garlic, and a brew of aged fish stock. In Relkin’s experience,
it appealed only to dragons and wood rats.
“Not at all, sir monk. I take the akh for my dragon.”
The monk’s eyes grew round. “Dragon? You are a dragoneer then. I am
very pleased to meet a dragoneer. I have heard much of their prowess.”
Relkin held out a hand. “Dragoneer First Class Relkin of Quosh, at your
service sir monk.”
The little man had a firm grip and beady, blue eyes. “I am Ton Akalon,
from the Isles of Cunfshon. I am working for the Soil Survey.”
Now it was Relkin’s turn to be surprised. The little man had come all
the way from Cunfshon! That explained the odd accent. All the way from
the fabled Isles of Cunfshon, with their witches and cities of ancient stone.
“And is there a dragon on this ship then?” asked the surveyor.
Relkin came out of revery. “There is Sir Ton. And I am his dragoneer.”
“Ton, please call me Ton. I would love to meet a dragon. Of course, one
has read all about them, but I have never had the opportunity of actually
seeing one in the flesh.”
By now, Relkin had collected a trencher of pie, plus the pail of
dumplings and akh, and a shoulder sack full of hot bread.
“My dragon would be honored to meet you, too, Sir Ton.”
“No, just Ton. I am not a knight of the empire, and I doubt that I ever
shall be. I am not a military man at all. My specialty is soil.”
“Soil?”
The little man’s eyes seemed to light up at the word.
“Yes, I am conducting a survey of the soils in Kenor. There are several
highly fertile basins, over limestone, with good deep soils. The empire is
considering making a considerable investment in these areas. Food is a
great trade weapon you see. Once Kenor begins exporting grains in
quantity, the empire will be able to vastly increase its effectiveness in the
diplomatic arena.”
“Food is a weapon?” This idea was new to Relkin.
“Yes, I’m afraid so. And I see your dragon likes plenty of it.” Ton
indicated the pail of dumplings, slathered in hot reeking akh that had
been set out for Relkin.
“Here, I’ve finished my own. Allow me to help,” said Ton Akalon, who
picked up the heavy pail of dumplings and waited for Relkin to show the
way. Relkin could detect no malice in the man, and his garb was too
humble to be that of an enemy. One problem the enemy always had was
that their agents did not care to pass as poor simple folk. Relkin recalled
the aura of menace that had surrounded the evil Magician Thrembode
when he had come to disable Bazil at the Dragon House in Marneri. Ton
Akalon had no such aura, in fact, he seemed utterly harmless.
Bazil as not in a good mood, but at the sight of dinner, his eyes lit up to
something like their normal brilliance.
“Baz, this is Ton Akalon from Cunfshon. He’s never met a dragon
before.”
Big black eyes examined the surveyor.
“I am Bazil of Quosh. This is my dragonboy, Relkin. I have few
complaints with him.”
摘要：

PROLOGUEItwaswhenthebishopfoundadeadchildtalkingtohim,justbeforeafuneralserviceintheHouseofAurosinthecityofDzuthatheknewhecouldnotescape.Atnighttheeyesboreintohim,likelancingpointsoffirefromthedark.Hisallegiancewasdemanded.Hisbeliefsmadeamockeryof.Avoicewhisperedinhisdreams.Anditwastrue,andheknewit....

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