14

Deceptions

Arlian tensed as the inn’s door opened again and the town guardsman stepped in. He quickly forced himself to relax, to appear calm, as he took another bite of the slightly stale bread the innkeeper had provided.

His bundle lay at his feet; he had had to open it to pay the landlord in advance, and the price of a bed and a meal had almost exhausted the money Sweet, Rose, and Hasty had given him. The meal before him was simply bread, cheese, a few dried plums, and a flagon of ale—the innkeeper insisted nothing else could be had at this hour, and Arlian had not argued beyond the minimum he felt necessary to stay in character, for fear of wiping out his funds completely if the innkeeper did find something better. He chewed slowly and picked up the ale as the guardsman approached, with a half-formed idea that if necessary he could fling the beer in the man’s face and make a run for it.

“My lord,” the guard said. “You wanted to know the cause of the disturbance.”

Arlian swallowed the bread and washed it down with a mouthful of cold ale. “Yes, I did,” he said. “Whatever happened? Was someone murdered in his bed?”

“No, no, nothing like that,” the guardsman assured him hastily. “It seems that one of the young women at, uh… a certain establishment was hiding someone from the management. He was discovered, and fled—making quite a mess in the process.”

Arlian feigned astonishment. “Hiding someone? You mean inside the house?”

“So it appears.”

“Well, well.” He shook his head in amused dismay. “However did the young woman get this lover of hers inside in the first place?”

The guard shook his head. “I don’t know, my lord. I don’t think anyone does—except the man himself, of course.”

“So you think that might have been the fellow with the nosebleed that I saw?”

“We think it likely, my lord, yes. Ah… could you tell us any more about the man you saw?”

“Of course. He was, oh, about your own height, I’d say…” The guard was easily three inches shorter than Arlian himself. “Thinner, though, with a square-cut beard.” The guard’s beard was rounded, and Arlian’s triangular. “And his clothes were disgraceful—homespun, one sleeve half off. I couldn’t tell if they were gray or brown or what, in the dark.” Arlian’s blouse was fine white linen, his breeches black wool. “Beyond that I really couldn’t say— it’s dark out there, and I was hardly considering asking him to sit for a portrait.”

“Of course, my lord. Thank you.” The guardsman bowed and retreated, leaving Arlian to finish his meal in peace.

And he did, marveling at how easy the deception had been.

The whores had told him that deception was easy; they had all had plenty of practice, feigning the reactions that their customers wanted, whether it was love or fear, pleasure or pain. “People see what they expect to see,” Rose had told him.

“People see what they want to see,” Sweet had corrected her. Arlian felt a pang at the memory; he had seen her just an hour or two before, and already he missed her.

He wondered what was happening back at the House of Carnal Society. Was Mistress taking some sort of retribution against Rose? Had she realized that all the whores were involved? She knew it wasn’t just Rose, from what she had said.

She couldn’t punish all of them. The women would be well enough, Arlian was sure.

After all, they knew how to deceive. They had taught him, and here he was, safe in an inn, playing the lord.

They had had him practice, play-acting various roles he might need if he wanted to move freely in Manfort and find ways to confront Lord Dragon. Here he had left the brothel less than an hour ago, his heart was still beating fast from the exertion of his escape, and he was already putting those lessons to good use.

Fate was being kind to him—or perhaps merely playing with him; after all, where was the generosity in allowing his discovery mere hours before his intended departure? Might he be on his way to some delightfully ironic catastrophe?

He sat holding the flagon, sipping at the last of the ale, smiling to himself at his own foolishness. No one could know what Fate had in store, but the last few months had certainly been interesting, and he was not dissatisfied with where he was now.

He finished the ale and made a face.

He had never drunk ale before; it was odd stuff, strong-flavored, cool and burning at the same time. He wasn’t sure whether he liked it. In the mine he had drunk only water; in the brothel he had drunk a variety of beverages, including juices and watered wine, but never any sort of beer or ale. Mistress had considered it inappropriate for her charges.

He would have to get used to ale, though; every young man of good fortune was expected to drink it in large quantities. He would also have to learn to tell good ale from bad; he hoped the innkeeper hadn’t expected any comment on what Arlian had just drunk.

There were so many things he still needed to learn! His education so far had been, to say the least, unorthodox, and he was painfully aware that while he knew far more about the uses of pickaxes and cosmetics than most men, he was woefully ignorant of ordinary things. Ale was just one trivial example.

Well, he would have plenty of time—especially if his grandfather’s stories were true, and dragon venom mixed in human blood extended life.

That was a strange prospect, and one he had sometimes faced with dread, on those rare occasions he thought of it at all—the idea of living a century or more in the mine or as a fugitive had held very little appeal.

Now, though, his life seemed to hold some promise— thanks to the finery and the training in deception that the girls had provided, he was now giving orders instead of taking them. He put down the empty flagon and called, “Innkeeper! Where’s that bed?”

The innkeeper showed him the way upstairs. Arlian’s room was small, tucked up under a gable on the third floor, but that hardly troubled him; it was equipped with niceties that he had done without since childhood, such as a window and a real floor. The bed was small and hard, the sheets rough—but Arlian really didn’t care, and settled into it blissfully.

He slept late, and took his time in dressing—not because he had many choices to make, but simply because he wanted to do it well. He had three pairs of breeches and four assorted shirts to his name, counting those sorry specimens he had been wearing when he first arrived at the House of Carnal Society, but the night’s adventures had ruined one blouse and left one pair of breeches sadly in need of cleaning and repair, reducing his circumstances farther. He had no mirror, and the room did not include one, so he had done the best he could with his face and hair using the windowglass—fortunately, he did have some of Sweet’s castoffs, including a sparsely toothed comb and a thinning boar-bristle hairbrush.

And he had two pairs of hose and his velvet slippers. It was a pleasure to slip them on—but one of his first purchases would have to be a pair of boots.

He had a fine coat with silk facing, as well, one that Sweet had labored long and hard over, but he was not going to wear that recklessly; it was too precious to risk in everyday use. When the need arose, though, he would be able to look every inch a lord.

By the time he was satisfied with his appearance the morning was well advanced, and most of the inn’s other guests already departed; Arlian had to make do with cold pastries for breakfast. He was finishing his third and brushing the crumbs from his lap, vaguely aware of the innkeeper talking to someone in the hallway, when the door of the common room burst open and Mistress marched in.

Arlian looked up, and struggled to hide any trace of recognition—although he had seen her through veils and peepholes several times, she had never before set her eyes on him, not even during last night’s flight.

He wanted to ask her what had happened, whether Rose and Sweet and Hasty were all safe, but he knew he mustn’t. He said nothing at all.

She glared around the room, and then at him.

“Who are you?” she demanded.

He blinked at her with exaggerated nonchalance. “Are you addressing me?” he asked.

“Yes!”

“Then I will thank you to do it politely,” he said coldly. He dabbed at his mouth with his napkin, fighting not to tremble. He felt cold just seeing her like this, with no concealment, nothing but his wits to protect him.

She bit her lip, still glaring; he could see her forcing herself to hide her anger. He wondered whether she had slept at all since yesterday.

“I beg your pardon,” she said. “Could you tell me please who you are?”

He flung the napkin on the table and stood up. .

“My name is Lanair,” he said. “My family’s holdings are in orchards between Deep Delving and the Smoking Mountain, and I employ some eleven freemen in my own name, so I trust you will address me accordingly. Now, who are you?”

“I am Madam Ril, of the House of Carnal Society,” she replied, only belatedly adding, “my lord.” Arlian nodded an acknowledgment, and she continued, “You are the man who arrived here late last night, after the inn had closed?”

“I am,” Arlian replied.

“I understand you saw a man running in the street last night.”

“I did,” Arlian acknowledged.

“Lord Lanair, it is absolutely essential that this man be found,” Madam Ril said. “Can you tell me anything that might help?”

“I gave a description to a guardsman last night,” he said. “I have nothing to add to that. Why is it of such importance?”

Madam Ril—Mistress—was visibly struggling to control herself.

“Because if we do not find who he was, and how he came to be there, the House will have to be destroyed,” she said.

Arlian had to swallow hard before he could say, “Oh? Why?” He hoped she would think he was getting down the last of his meal, and not see how concerned he was.

If the House was destroyed, what would become of the women? Rose’s phrase “dog food” echoed in his memory, and Bloody Hand’s statement that there was no justice in this world.

“Because my clients expect safety and privacy in their visits there,” Ril replied. “If we cannot guarantee that, if there might be spies or assassins lurking… you understand, our clients are peculiarly vulnerable. We cater to the wealthy, the powerful…”

“I know,” Arlian said. “I believe my cousin Inthior has patronized your establishment.”

She nodded at the name. “Yes, then you must surely see—these are men with enemies. If I cannot assure their safety, I cannot operate.”

“Indeed,” Arlian acknowledged. “Well, that’s most unfortunate, I suppose, but it’s hardly my concern. I told that guardsman everything I had to tell.”

“A nosebleed, you said.”

“Yes.”

“We found no blood.”

Arlian remembered the long scratch on one calf that he’d received plunging through Sparkle’s ceiling and frowned. He had invented the nosebleed because he thought he’d left blood spots here and there, but apparently he had not. “I suppose he managed to catch it all on his shirt,” he said. “Really, I have no idea of any details; I merely caught a glimpse. He certainly appeared to have blood on his beard and running from his nose.”

“Did you see what he wore on his feet?”

“I’m afraid not. I was more concerned with my own just then; I lost my horse last night, you know, and my boots with him.”

“I’m sorry to hear it, my lord. Your sword, as well? The guardsman said you did not have it with you.”

“Yes,” Arlian said, realizing for the first time that that was a serious flaw in his disguise. A real lord would not travel abroad unarmed. The lords he had seen at the House of Carnal Society had left their weapons downstairs, of course, but undoubtedly they had all carried swords when walking the streets. He had sometimes risked a glance out a window at the streets, and seen as much. The lack of a sword at the breakfast table was unremarkable, but arriving at the inn without one…

Well, his runaway horse was enough explanation for the moment. He should have mentioned it sooner, though, before it was questioned.

“You can think of nothing more that might aid us in finding this man?” Mistress asked.

Arlian shook his head. “Nothing at all,” he said. “I trust you will be able to apprehend him without my assistance.”

“I hope so,” Ril said. “I very much hope so.”

She stared blankly at him for a moment, and he realized that the discussion was over; he turned away, dismissing her with a wave of his hand, and headed for the stairs.

As he mounted the steps he frowned and mulled over just what he should do next. He had intended to head for Manfort and look for work after he left the brothel, but he had not expected to be a fugitive, or to be concerned about the welfare of Sweet and the others.

His fugitive status seemed more urgent; surely nothing irrevocable would be done about the women until the escaped trespasser was found. His disguise seemed to be working reasonably well, but sooner or later someone might realize that his arrival, sans swords and boots, at the very same time the trespasser escaped was just a little too coincidental.

Madame Ril might already be suspicious.

Furthermore, now he was known here as Lord Lanair— what if he were to reach Manfort seeking employment, and be recognized as Lanair? Would he need to maintain this identity for the rest of his life? He didn’t mind the name, certainly—after months of answering to “Triv” he could scarcely object to a respectable name like Lanair—but sooner or later someone might turn up who knew that no such person as Lord Lanair had lived between Deep Delving and the Smoking Mountain. He might do better to go somewhere else for a while.

Or perhaps he should go back to the brothel and try to rescue Rose and Sweet. Surely, none of his pursuers would expect that!

He continued to think about it as he packed up his belongings and cinched tight the canvas bundle.

By the time he had settled his bill the sun was almost directly overhead. He blinked at the brightness as he opened the inn’s front door; his eyes were still more accustomed to darkness than to daylight. He squinted as he looked either way along the street.

Then he stopped and stared.

A crowd had gathered around the House of Carnal Society. Coaches stood at the brothel’s two doors and along the wall between them—perhaps half a dozen vehicles in all, each of them large and splendid. Arlian had never before seen so many coaches in one place.

From what he could see of the gawkers around them, neither had anyone else in Westguard.

He had still intended to head east, toward either Manfort or the Blood of the Grape, but now instead he strolled up the street, as casually as he could, to see what the excitement was about.

As he approached he could hear voices arguing, loud, angry voices, both male and female. He could also see things being carried out of the brothel and loaded into the coaches, boxes and bundles of various shapes and sizes, and with a shock he realized that some of those bundles were the women who had lived there, wrapped in blankets. A few struggled and protested; most did not.

A driver shouted a command, and one of the coaches pulled away, the horses straining—they looked tired, and Arlian wondered where they had come from. Had they pulled that coach all the way from Manfort just that morning?

The coach came toward him, gathering speed, and he stepped out of its path. As it went by he glimpsed Hasty and another woman through the windows—the other might have been Kitten, but he couldn’t be sure. The passengers also included a well-dressed man and one of the brothel guards.

The House of Carnal Society was being closed down, just as Mistress had said—and so quickly! Arlian had had no idea it would happen so fast.

At least the women were being taken away unhurt— though he worried about where they were being taken.

Another coach pulled away but turned down another street, where Arlian could not see who it carried.

He reached the edge of the crowd and tried to push his way forward—but the crowd pushed back, as two more coaches began rolling.

A tall man was standing in the open door of one of the two remaining vehicles, facing the brothel’s open door— Arlian could see his back, but could make out no details. Mistress stood beside the door, shouting at him, pleading and threatening—Arlian could not make out her exact words, but the tone was plain enough.

A fifth coach pulled away, leaving only the one where the tall man stood, and Arlian found himself abruptly pushed forward, closer to the scene at the brothel door. He could see two women in the remaining coach—Sweet and Dove, both sitting in terrified silence, huddled against the rear of the compartment. Arlian took an involuntary step forward at the sight of Sweet, then caught himself.

No guard sat in that coach, but the driver was in place, reins and whip ready in his hands. Arlian dared not approach too closely.

Sweet and Dove were alive and well, even if they were scared; he had no need to risk his own life in an attempt to intervene in whatever was happening.

Two guardsmen appeared in the doorway—one wore the uniform of the brothel’s guards, while the other was in Westguard’s livery. They said something Arlian couldn’t catch, and the man in the coach ordered clearly, “Burn it.”

The two hesitated, and Mistress screamed in protest.

The man in the coach drew a long, slim sword and repeated his order, steel blade naked in his hand. “Burn it, I said!”

The two guards bowed a hasty acknowledgment and ducked back inside.

Six coaches, Arlian saw, and in each one he had seen clearly there had been two women and one guard, as well as the driver and the coach’s owner. That accounted for twelve of the sixteen whores, and all the six guards.

Where were the other four women?

Why had the guards hesitated?

“Oh, gods,” Arlian said, suddenly panicking. “Don’t let it be true!” He pushed forward desperately, trying to shove his way through the crowd.

He had seen a few great injustices in his life, and he had loathed them, suffered from them; he could not stand idly by as another was perpetrated. He could not quietly allow four women to be burned to death because he had been sheltered among them. There must be some way he could prevent it.

“Please, my lord!” Mistress shrieked, stepping toward the man in the coach, arms raised in supplication—even in his distress, a part of Arlian’s mind marveled at the sight of the dreaded Mistress so terrified.

“Madam Ril,” the man in the coach roared back, “You were responsible for this. You failed in your trust.”

The sword flashed, and for a moment the world froze. Arlian could not believe what he was seeing.

Then time started again as Madam Ril crumpled to the ground, blood spurting from her throat; gasps and screams came from the crowd. The swordsman wiped his blade on a handkerchief and sheathed it just as the guards reemerged from the brothel door at a trot.

“Get in,” the swordsman told the brothel guard, as he himself bent and sank back into the coach, settling on one of the seats. Now, for the first time, Arlian could see the man’s face.

The coach rocked as the guard climbed aboard and slammed the door, but Arlian saw that face clearly—that beardless face with the scarred right cheek, as if something had once gouged pieces away…

“Lord Dragon!” Arlian called, without meaning to—the cry had been startled out of him by the shock of recognition just as Lord Dragon rapped on the coach’s ceiling and the driver shook out the reins.

No one had heard, so far as he could see.

Arlian struggled against the crowd—people were backing away in fear and confusion as Madam Ril lay motionless and bleeding on the street and wisps of smoke began to trickle from the brothel doorway.

The coach started moving, and Arlian stared, torn.

He had to stop the coach and get at Lord Dragon, he had to rescue Sweet and Dove, he had to avenge his family and all the other innocents, and even Madam Ril—monster though she was, how could Lord Dragon cut her down in broad daylight, before a hundred witnesses, and expect to get away with it?

But he had to get into the brothel, he had to find the other women.

By the time he fought free of the crowd’s press the coach was fifty yards away and picking up speed, and smoke was bleeding from the brothel in a dozen places. The town guard who had helped start the fire was standing in the doorway, his short sword drawn.

Arlian hurried up to him and then stopped dead as the guardsman raised his ugly blade.

“Where do you think you’re going, my lord?” he demanded.

“I… I thought there might be someone still inside,” he said. “I thought I heard voices.”

“You didn’t hear voices, my lord, and we’ll have no looting here. You did hear the owner ordered it burned.”

“But really, I thought… you’re sure there’s no one inside?”

“No one alive,” the guard replied. “There are four dead slaves, with their throats cut, just like this one.” He gestured at Madam Ril.

“Oh,” Arlian said, stepping back.

The coach was too far away to catch now—and if he had caught it, what would he do? He was alone and unarmed, and Lord Dragon and the guard had swords and clearly weren’t afraid to use them. Sweet and Dove might help, but…

No, it was hopeless.

But there would come another time, he swore to himself—he and Lord Dragon would meet a third time, and Lord Dragon would pay for his crimes.

For now, though—could the guard be sure the other four women were dead?

“Excuse me,” Arlian said, pushing his way back out through the crowd.

A few minutes later he had slipped into the stableyard, just as he had months before.

This time, though, smoke was billowing from the eaves and the windows were blackened, showing occasional flickers of bright orange where the glass was not yet completely obscured. Arlian dropped his bundle, then found a cast-off horseshoe and heaved it at a window.

The glass shattered and flame puffed out.

Arlian broke another, and this time only a swirl of thin gray smoke emerged; he positioned the barrel beneath that one, ran, and jumped. A moment later he was inside, holding his blouse over his mouth as he struggled to see through the smoke.

The room he had entered had been partially stripped— bedcurtains gone, furniture overturned. Smoke was a thick haze, but no flames were visible.

The corridor beyond was like a glimpse into the crater— smoke rolling across the ceiling, flames licking the walls and spilling under the doors, horribly reminiscent of the scene in the pantry of his childhood home as the dragons burned Obsidian. Pushing the memories aside and crouching to stay below the smoke, Arlian hurried to check each bedroom.

He found the first corpse in the second room he checked—Silk, one of the oldest of the women. Her throat had been slit from ear to ear, and she lay in a dried circle of her own blackened blood.

The third room was empty, and he could go no farther down the passage; the rest of the second floor was awash in flame. He turned and made a quick dash up the stairs to the third, where he found one more body.

Rose lay across her bed, naked head flung back, hair dragging on the floor, blood still trickling down her chin.

And the smoke and flame were thickening rapidly; he fled down the stairs and escaped, climbing back out the window and dropping to the barrelhead. The other two were surely beyond hope, as well.

Coughing and weeping, he jumped to the ground, found his bundle and stumbled away, bound for the Blood of the Grape.

15

At the Caravansary

Arlian frowned as he looked down at himself. He had put on his fine silk-faced coat, as the day had turned chilly, and that looked as elegant as he might ask, but underneath the coat his blouse was soaked in sweat and streaked with smoke, and his breeches were no better. His new slippers were scuffed. The canvas wrapping on his bundle of possessions, which he had not taken into the burning building, was cleaner than most of his garments, despite having been smeared with mud when he first fled.

He needed to take better care of his clothes, obviously.

He also needed to get more of them. This whorehouse finery was all very well, but not really suited to an active life, and he seemed destined to lead an active life.

He really did need to find employment—or some other source of money. He wished that amethysts really were precious—months ago he had shown one of his larger ones to Sparkle, the brothel’s resident self-taught expert on gemstones, who had declared it lovely but worthless.

At least in the Lands of Man; in distant, possibly mythical Arithei, who could say?

Lord Kuruvan’s gold, on the other hand, would be good anywhere, and Arlian no longer had any compunctions about taking it. Lord Kuruvan had been one of the owners of the House of Carnal Society; that undoubtedly meant he had been in one those coaches, and had carried away two of the women…

But not Rose. He had left Rose lying there with her throat cut.

Perhaps he had had her killed because he had told her where his money was hidden; perhaps he had simply tired of her, or liked the other two better.

Or perhaps Rose had been killed because she had hidden Arlian in the attic above her room, and Kuruvan had had no say in it.

It didn’t matter. Whatever the reason, Rose was dead, and Lord Kuruvan was an accomplice in her murder.

Arlian intended to collect a blood-price, if he could—if Lord Kuruvan had not thought better of his hiding place and moved the money elsewhere. Taking that money would be a start on avenging Rose.

And there were a dozen women to be rescued, as well— Sweet among them. Arlian was determined to find and free them all—someday. He had no idea where they had been taken; the coaches had left no trails he could see. They were still alive somewhere, though, most probably in Manfort, and in time he would find them and rescue them. The thought of Sweet in Lord Dragon’s possession, forced to obey his every whim, haunted Arlian; somehow the idea of a single master abusing her was even worse than the casual mistreatment she had received from so many in Westguard.

Kuruvan’s gold might be enough to buy the women free. If possible, Arlian promised himself, he would do that, and see them all safe, before he pursued his revenge.

He would have revenge, though.

The dragons that had destroyed Obsidian needed to be punished, but they had been acting within their own nature; looting the ruins was simple greed, and understandable, if reprehensible; but Lord Dragon, Lord Kuruvan, and the others had killed those five women and destroyed the House of Carnal Society on little more than a whim, so far as Arlian could see. Such callousness was beyond his comprehension, and he could not permit it to go unchallenged. The mere thought of it set him trembling. Anything he could do to avenge that crime, anything, he would do.

Stealing Lord Kuruvan’s gold, and perhaps using it to buy the women if he could find them, was all he could see a way to accomplish as yet, but he swore the day would come when he would do more, when he would see each of those six lords suffer for their evil.

If Lord Kuruvan’s gold financed that revenge, so much the better. Arlian just wished he had some clearer notion of how that revenge might be brought about. As he neared Manfort he grew ever more aware of the size of the place, and the difficulties he might face in locating and destroying his enemies there; he seemed to see guardsmen everywhere as he drew closer to the city, and was uncomfortably aware that even in his deteriorating disguise as a lord he was still unarmed and untrained, with nothing to support him but his own wits and the guidance the women of the House of Carnal Society had given him.

That hardly seemed enough.

He looked up again as he rounded a bend in the road. Manfort was an immense presence ahead of him now—it was built on a hill, and he could see walls within walls rising up the slopes, a maze of buildings and fortifications, towers thrusting up here and there. A thousand plumes of smoke trailed up into the blue springtime sky, and he could make out, directly ahead of him but still a mile or two away, the tops of the great gray gates.

Closer at hand, though, was a square, a place where the road widened into a broad plaza paved with stone—and that plaza was crowded with a variety of wagons, men, women, and oxen. A babble of voices reached him.

He frowned. Who were all these people? What was this place?

Then between two of the taller wagons he caught sight of a sign at one side of the square—a board on which two crudely sketched green leaves, a black line for a stem, and a score of overlapping red circles represented a bunch of grapes, with red drops dripping from them.

The Blood of the Grape. This was the inn where Rose had said Lord Kuruvan hid his gold. The wagons and oxen were presumably owned by patrons of the inn.

Arlian tucked his bundle securely under one arm, raised his head, and marched forward.

The crowd seethed around him; surely it couldn’t always be like this here! Something special must be going on. He tried to catch the words of those he passed.

A driver was telling a woman to make sure their daughter stayed clear of certain individuals; two men lifting boxes from one open wagon to another were complaining about the weight of their burdens.

Here was a man in a black leather tunic seated in the driver’s place on one of the simplest of the closed-in wagons, talking to a guardsman who stood by the wheel; Arlian slowed his pace and strained to hear.

“… no, really! Do you want to spend the rest of your life rousting pickpockets and helping drunkards home and never get farther than Southwark or Westguard?”

“Well, if I spend my life that way it’s likely to be a good bit longer than yours,” the guardsman retorted. “Sooner or later you’ll get a bandit’s arrow in the neck, or bad water in your gut, or some ghastly foreign disease in your heart, and I’ll be safe at home by my own hearth while you cough out your life in some stinking desert.”

“Oh, I won’t deny there are a few hazards on the road,” the man in the wagon said, “but how many of your comrades have gotten a knife in the back while breaking up a brawl? Life’s a risk anywhere, man! Your own wife might go mad and slit your throat while you sleep.”

The guardsman snorted. “You’ll have to find your men somewhere else,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“So I see,” the man on the wagon said. “Well, if you know anyone with a soul more adventurous than your own, send them to me—I’ll feel better with a few more blades along.”

Arlian stopped dead and listened as the two men said farewells, and the guardsman ambled away.

This leather-clad person, whoever he was, was hiring men. Arlian might well need an income; he couldn’t be sure Kuruvan’s gold was still there. He hesitated, then turned and stepped up to the side of the wagon.

“Excuse me,” he said.

The man in black leather had been scanning the crowd, but now he turned around and looked Arlian in the eye. “Yes?” he said.

Arlian frowned, trying to phrase his question; the man in black leather mistook the reason for the frown and added, in a tone a real lord might have considered insolent, “My lord.”

Arlian heard the insolence, but he was hardly about to quarrel with it; he was no lord, not really, and this man was not someone he cared to antagonize. The eyes gazing at him were a cold gray-blue, set in a weathered, scarred face between hair pulled back in a tight knot and a beard trimmed unfashionably short. One of the man’s hands rested on the hilt of a sword that lay on the seat beside him; the other gripped the hilt of a dagger sheathed on his belt. The fellow appeared ready for anything—but those cold eyes were somehow not hostile; he was looking at Arlian with fair consideration. The youth had the impression that this was a man who really saw what he looked at and listened to what he heard, rather than perceiving what he expected to see and hear.

“I couldn’t help overhearing part of what you said to that guardsman,” Arlian said.

“My sympathies on your inability,” the man said, raising one corner of his mouth sardonically. “I sometimes think the gods erred in not providing a means to close our ears, as we close our eyes.”

Arlian managed a weak smile in return. “Am I correct in believing you are hiring men?”

The grip on the dagger-hilt loosened visibly.

“Not precisely,” the man said. “I am aware of someone who is, however.”

“Ah,” Arlian said. “And who would that be? I’d be grateful for whatever you might tell me of this matter.”

“Would you, indeed, my lord?”

Arlian nodded. “I’m a stranger here,” he said.

The man in black considered Arlian for a moment. “It is my understanding,” he said at last, “that the caravan master has budgeted for a dozen guards for this trip, and as yet has hired only eight, myself included. For my part, I don’t think a dozen any more than adequate and I’d be glad if he found more.”

At the word “caravan” understanding dawned upon Arlian; the confusion around him suddenly made sense, and old childhood dreams burst into renewed life. He remembered Grandsir’s tales of travel, and his own desire to emulate the old man.

“A caravan!” he said. “Of course. And where does it go? What goods does it bear?”

“We go east, to the port city of Lorigol,” the man said. “As for what we carry, we carry whatever the investors choose to send—but I’d assume you’ll find bolts of cloth, jars of herbs, and the like in these wagons.” He took his hand off his dagger and waved in a gesture that took in most of the plaza.

Arlian nodded. “And you need more guards?”

“I’d say so,” the man said dryly.

“And…well…” Arlian wasn’t sure what to ask next, and the guard took pity on him.

“You’re thinking of signing on, then? Seeking adventure in the wide world?”

“Yes, exactly!” Arlian said, smiling. He had intended to go on into Manfort in pursuit of his vengeance and Sweet’s rescue, but now he suddenly found himself with an attractive alternative. He was still determined to free the surviving whores, still determined to find some way to strike at the dragons that had destroyed Obsidian, but he was young, he had time, and the world was large and he had seen so little of it. From his mountainside village he had seen the land spread out before him, but most of what he had seen since had been stone walls or a stuffy attic. To get away from his past for a time, to breathe fresh air and see new lands… that would be good for him, he knew it.

And he would make some money, learn more of life as a free man, give himself more of a grounding before he flung himself at his foes in his pursuit of vengeance.

Of course, it meant that the women would remain in captivity somewhat longer—but he had no way to find them, nor means to free them, in any event. Perhaps a few weeks with a caravan would give him time to plan and prepare.

“You’d be willing to serve as a mere guard?” the man in black asked, interrupting Arlian’s thoughts. “It’s hardly suitable work for a lord.”

“My holdings are greatly diminished,” Arlian improvised. “I must take what I can find.”

“Can you fight?”

“I can learn,” Arlian replied promptly.

“Have you your sword? We leave tomorrow at dawn, or as close as we can manage with this many wagons—there’s no time to fetch your great-grandfather’s blade from the family vaults in Blackwater, or wherever it might be.”

“I have no sword,” Arlian admitted.

“Ah. Then you aren’t fully a lord yet?”

“No.” Arlian could scarcely argue with that. His disguise, as he had feared, had a fatal flaw.

“Have you any armor, perhaps?”

“No,” Arlian said, seeing his dreams fleeing back into childhood fantasy. “Not so much as a penknife.”

The man did not dismiss him, as Arlian had expected; instead he stared at Arlian with those intense blue eyes for a moment. “Could you use a sword if you had one?” he asked.

Perhaps there was hope after all. “I could learn,” Arlian insisted.

“My lord,” the man said, “If you want to learn swordsmanship, there are schools and tutors—signing on as a caravan guard is not the easiest way. Hasn’t your father offered to have you taught?”

“My father is long dead,” Arlian said.

“He left you no sword?”

Arlian shook his head. “It’s lost.”

“And your mother?”

“Dead as well—and my brother with her.” That much was true—and if the man assumed that the family’s sword had been lost in the same catastrophe, Arlian would not disabuse him of the idea.

“And the family business?”

“Gone as well.”

“I begin to understand,” the man in black said. “Nothing left but your pride, eh, my lord?” The mockery that had been in his voice whenever he spoke the title before had been replaced by pity.

“A little more than that,” Arlian said defensively, remembering Kuruvan’s cache. “I believe I can buy a sword and armor—and pay you to teach me their use.”

“What makes you think I know enough to teach anyone?”

“You didn’t get those scars on your face from a woman’s fingernails,” Arlian said.

The man in black laughed. “No, those scars are on my back,” he agreed.

“And I heard what you told that townsman,” Arlian continued. “If you have so little fear of bandits, then you must have confidence in your own skill, and you don’t look like someone easily deluded, even by himself.”

The man nodded. “How much can you pay?”

Arlian hesitated. “I’m not sure,” he admitted. The truth was he wasn’t entirely sure the money was there at all, or how he could get his hands on it if it was—the innkeeper was not simply going to let a stranger carry a keg out of the cellars, no questions asked. “I still need to settle a few accounts. You’ll be here until tomorrow’s dawn?” That would give him one night to get what he needed.

The guard nodded. “But the caravan master may hire all the men he needs before that,” he warned. “In fact, I hope he does—I hate traveling with overconfident fools and insufficient defense.”

Arlian’s expression turned woeful, and the man in black smiled.

“There will be other caravans,” he said. “They gather here every so often. Perhaps instead of accompanying me to Lorigol you’ll find some other teacher bound southward to the Borderlands, or west to the mountain tribes. Go get your sword and armor, and…”

He stopped in midsentence and considered Arlian thoughtfully.

“Do you know how to choose a sword?” he asked. “Or armor?”

Arlian shook his head. “I was only eleven when my father died,” he said.

“But you’ve lasted this long without him.”

Arlian shrugged.

The man in black studied him. Then he looked around the plaza. Finally his gaze returned to Arlian.

“Do you have the money with you? Enough for a sword?”

“No,” Arlian admitted. “But I should have it by some time tonight.”

The man snorted, and gestured at the western sky, where the sun was much nearer the horizon that the zenith. “I can hardly hope to see you equipped by dawn if you don’t have the funds until tonight! But I don’t know that I like this caravan master that much in any case; he should have had his full complement of guards by now, and I shouldn’t have to do his recruiting. I’ll tell you what, my would-be lord—if this caravan doesn’t have twelve good men signed on by morning, I’ll stay here and take your money and see you properly fitted out, and we’ll join the next one that comes along, if it’s headed somewhere worth going. Would that suit you?”

“I believe it would,” Arlian said cautiously.

Indeed, it might prove ideal. If the next caravan did not depart until some days had passed, he might have time to learn some basic swordsmanship from this man, he might be able to rescue the women, and then carry them all away with him when the caravan departed.

He didn’t want to commit himself too completely, though; he might not be able to get the money at all, and he did not want to be responsible for costing this man his employment.

The guard seemed confident that he could find another job readily enough, though, and Arlian didn’t doubt it was true; certainly, had Arlian been hiring guards, this man appeared formidable and experienced enough.

“Well, then,” the man in black said. “Go and settle your accounts, and I’ll see you in the morning.”

“And what name shall I give when I look for you?” Arlian asked.

The guard smiled. “They call me Black,” he said, hooking a thumb under his leather tunic and displaying it. “And you?”

“Lanair,” Arlian said—he thought that alias was still safe enough.

“Then perhaps I’ll see you in the morning, Lord Lanair,” Black said. “Or perhaps not—I may be gone by the time you rise, if all goes well. Or you may be gone, if those accounts you wish to settle aren’t cooperative, eh?”

Arlian managed a nervous laugh. “The morning, then,” he said. He essayed a quick bow, then turned and made his way through the crowd toward the inn.

16

The Blood of the Grape

The interior of the Blood of the Grape was as crowded as the plaza. Harried boys and women were carrying trays back and forth through the throng in the common room; every chair was occupied, and most had someone standing behind them, waiting for the present occupant to finish.

Arlian had not anticipated anything like this when he heard Rose describe Lord Kuruvan’s hiding place; he had expected a quiet little inn like the Weary Traveler, not a vast and crowded caravansary.

The caravan merchants would surely have made most of their preparations elsewhere—in Manfort, or on their estates, or in the surrounding towns. This was only a final gathering place for the wagons and travelers.

The caravan’s personnel had certainly gathered, though, and they were obviously enjoying this chance to obtain food and drink in a civilized setting before venturing out into wilder lands.

Although, Arlian realized, those lands might not be that much wilder; surely there were other inns, other caravansaries, on the roads to the east. The route to Lorigol could be peppered with such establishments, neatly spaced, each one day’s journey from the last—at least for part of the distance. If the entire route were safe, there would be no need to travel in caravans in the first place.

Arlian knew little of geography beyond what he had been able to see from the Smoking Mountain, or what his grandfather had told him; he had no idea how far Lorigol was from Manfort, or what lay between, or where the ships that sailed from that port might trade. For the first time in his life that ignorance troubled him. He realized he didn’t have any very clear idea how long he would be gone if he signed onto a caravan.

Those were all matters he could worry about later, he told himself; for now he needed to focus on getting at Lord Kuruvan’s gold. He looked about, trying to think what he should do next.

He had originally thought he would take a room at the inn—though that might have been difficult in any case, since his entire remaining fortune, after settling at the Weary Traveler, consisted of eight coppers and a tiny silver coin of uncertain value—and then sneak out of his room at night, find his way down into the cellars, and carry off the keg. If it was there.

That was clearly not going to work; this place was full of people, and even if he could still somehow get a bed he was sure he wouldn’t get a room to himself. He doubted that he could move about the place, even in the middle of the night, without waking anyone.

He found himself a corner in which to stand, dropped his bundle to the floor, and watched the crowds while he tried to puzzle out a plan.

The steps were easy enough to spell out: He needed to get down into the cellars; he needed to find the keg; and he needed to get the gold out of the inn.

He had intended to sneak down into the cellars by night, but it belatedly occurred to him that he might not have been able to do so in any case; the cellars were probably kept locked. If so, his original scheme wouldn’t have worked at all; he was vaguely aware that there were ways to open locks without the appropriate keys, but he certainly didn’t know any of them.

That might complicate matters.

At present he didn’t even know where the cellar door was, but that would be easy enough to remedy—he could just follow one of the servers.

Once in the cellars, finding the keg should be fairly easy—how many kegs marked “sour wine” would there be? But getting it out through a crowd like this would not be so simple. He could not possibly hope to get it out unseen.

For a moment he considered ways he might simply carry it out openly—could he claim to be Lord Kuruvan’s representative, come to fetch it?

No. The innkeeper would surely demand at least a letter from Kuruvan, and there might well be a prearranged password, or some other means of verifying his right to the keg.

Could he switch it with another keg, and claim that he was a merchant in the caravan and it was his own property?

No, there would almost certainly be paperwork of some sort. He couldn’t expect to get away with that.

Carrying a keg out openly wasn’t going to work; someone would want to know who he was and where he was going. It would take an incredibly audacious thief to simply walk in and carry a keg away, but it wasn’t impossible that it had been tried. He’d been successfully audacious, back in Westguard, but he couldn’t rely on it.

Besides, how big was this keg? How far could he carry it? Where would he take it? Would the innkeeper notice that it was gone?

Then a thought struck him. He didn’t really want the keg at all; he wanted what was in it. Suppose he were to knock the bottom in, take out the gold, and leave the empty keg where it was? A real keg of wine would make a mess, but gold wouldn’t leak out on the floor.

He had no tools to stave it in, but there would probably be something down there to tap the barrels of ale, after all.

He prodded his bundled belongings with one toe. He had only a tiny purse, one intended for a woman, that Sweet had given him; that would surely not be big enough for the booty he was after. He had no proper sack or chest, but he ought to be able to find something he could wrap the gold in quickly. One of his shirts, perhaps.

If he knotted the sleeves, then tied the collar shut—or just used the sleeves as sacks…

That might work. He might not be able to fit all the gold at once, if the keg were actually full—but that hardly seemed likely.

Then another, better thought struck him. He had another pair of stockings, in addition to those he wore. He could use those as sacks. They might not hold very much, but then he didn’t know how much was there.

He just needed to get into the right part of the cellars, and to be left alone there for a moment or two.

He considered the crowds, then knelt, opened his bundle, found the hosiery, and tucked it into the waistband of his breeches. Then he rolled his belongings back up and replaced the belts.

The next step was to hire an accomplice. He stood again and scanned the crowd. Then he stepped back to the door and looked out at the plaza.

He saw no promising candidates inside, but outside there were several children scattered about, in various attire. Some were helping load wagons, or running back and forth, but a few were merely standing and watching.

Arlian made his way toward a group of these—three of them, two girls and a boy, the oldest no more than ten, all three of them wearing little more than rags. As he drew near one of the girls happened to glance in his direction, and he caught her eye and beckoned.

She quickly slipped away from the others and came near him—but stopped out of reach and looked up at him warily. She was no more than eight, he judged, and woefully thin and dirty.

“Good evening,” Arlian said cheerfully. “Would you be interested in earning a little money?” He held out one of his coins.

She nodded enthusiastically.

Arlian knelt, bringing himself down to her level, as he fished two more coins and added them to the first.

“In a few minutes,” he said quietly, holding out the coins, “I’m going to go into the inn. After I do, I want you to count as high as you can—can you count to a hundred?”

She nodded again.

“Good. Then count to a hundred, or even more if you like. Then go to the back door of the inn and find someone who works there, and tell him that a man named Lord Inthior wants to speak to the proprietor right now. He can’t leave his wagon so he hired you to send the message. Do you understand?”

She nodded.

“Can you do that? Can you remember that, and say it?”

She nodded.

“Let me hear you say it, then.”

“Lord Inthior’s at his wagon and he wants to talk to the innkeeper right now, and he’s really mad about something!” she piped, in a high, clear voice.

Arlian smiled. “Very good.”

“And I count to a hundred first, or more, so you have time to get somewhere.”

The girl was clearly not stupid or naive. “And when the proprietor comes out, you don’t see Lord Inthior anywhere, he must be gone.”

“I guess he got tired of waiting,” she agreed. He handed her the three coins. “Do this, and you’ll have three more later tonight. Fair enough?” She nodded.

“And in case you’re thinking this might be too dangerous and you’d be better with just the three, here’s the best part,” Arlian said. “If anyone suspects anything and gets mad, you can tell the truth and say I paid you. I’m Lord Inthior’s cousin. I’m not going to steal anything; I just want to check something while the proprietor’s not looking.”

She smiled broadly, obviously relieved—until then her expression had been utterly serious. “Oh, good,” she said. “Thank you, my lord; I’ll do what you said.” The three coins disappeared; Arlian didn’t see what she did with them.

“Good,” he said, getting back to his feet. “I’m counting on you.”

She nodded; he smiled at her, then turned away and headed for the inn.

Once inside it took longer than he liked to find the proprietor of the Blood of the Grape; the staff was busy, and not sure just where their employer was at any given time. At last, though, he found himself face to face with a formidable old woman.

“Lord Kuruvan sent me,” Arlian said. “You may have heard about a recent disturbance in Westguard?”

“I might have,” the innkeeper agreed.

“Well, there was a disturbance,” Arlian said. “And as a result of that incident, my uncle is concerned about his investments.”

“Everything’s fine here,” the woman said. “It’s busy tonight because of the Lorigol expedition, but we’ve had no trouble. You can tell your uncle he’ll have his rent on time.”

Arlian hid his surprise and quickly revised what he had planned to say; it had not occurred to him that Kuruvan might own the inn, but of course it made sense. What better place to leave his cache than on his own property?

And that explained how Kuruvan could be sure the innkeeper wouldn’t get curious and investigate what was really in the keg—Kuruvan had probably brought the keg here himself when the innkeeper wasn’t around, and as the owner he would have had free access to the cellars—or anywhere else. The innkeeper probably didn’t even know the keg was there, let alone what was in it.

That should make Arlian’s job easier.

“Of course,” he said. “He was never in any doubt of that. However, he asked me to look around and make certain that everything is in order.”

The innkeeper—not actually the proprietor at all, Arlian now realized—frowned. “Look where? At the accounts?”

“No, no—he wouldn’t trust me to do that. Just to see that everything here is as it should be. He asked me particularly to make sure that no one’s hiding in the cellars—I understand some scoundrel had concealed himself most cleverly in Westguard, and my uncle is concerned lest that be repeated here. If you would permit me to see the cellars for a moment, I can satisfy myself that his fears are groundless and be on my way.”

“Hiding in the cellars?” She plainly thought the idea was ridiculous.

Arlian shrugged. “This fellow reportedly hid in an attic for several days in Westguard.”

The innkeeper looked him in the eye, then glanced over his clothing.

“You’re Lord Kuruvan’s nephew?”

“Well, yes,” Arlian said. “My name is Lanair.”

“Do you have a letter, or other credentials?”

Arlian shook his head. “No. But I’m not going to take anything, or look at the accounts; I just want to poke around the cellars enough to satisfy Lord Kuruvan.”

She stared thoughtfully at him.

He sighed theatrically. “I know my appearance is a disgrace, and I should have a letter,” he said. “But I don’t. My uncle insisted I come here immediately, lest the villain escape.”

“Well, come on, then,” she said. “I don’t have time to argue about it. You’ll have to leave that with one of my staff, though.” She pointed at his bundle.

“Of course,” he agreed.

When that was arranged, she led the way to the cellar door. They had to step aside as a serving wench emerged with a tray of brimming mugs of ale, but then the innkeeper led the way down worn stone steps into the cool, lamplit gloom.

For a moment, as they reached the bottom and stepped onto stone pavement, Arlian felt an unreasoning rash of terror; the stone walls and lamplight were so reminiscent of the mines that on some level he felt himself flung back in time, trapped and enslaved again. Then he recovered and looked about with interest at the barrels that lined either side of a passage ahead.

In addition to wall-mounted fixtures, a shelf mounted between two barrels held four brass lamps similar to those used in the mine, all lit; the innkeeper took one of them down and led the way along the passage between the two rows of barrels. “Beer and ale and cider on that side,” she said, waving to the left, where a dozen huge tapped barrels were racked side by side against a stone wall. “Then the ordinary red and white over here,” she continued, indicating the right, where nine or ten smaller barrels, only two of them tapped, formed a barrier separating the passage from the unlit remainder of the cellars. Two gaps in the row provided access to that dark space beyond.

Arlian nodded as he maneuvered past a serving maid drawing ale from a barrel, noting that a tap, a corkscrew, a hammer, and a crowbar hung from hooks below the shelf of lamps, each tool on a leather thong. He stooped to glance under the framework supporting the barrels, acting out his ruse of searching for a concealed fugitive.

He had expected the innkeeper to turn to the right and take them through one of those gaps in the line of barrels, into the main part of the cellars, but she did not. At the end of the passage stood a heavy wooden door; the innkeeper marched directly up to it. She transferred the lamp to her left hand and fished a key from her pocket with the right to unlock it.

“The superior wines,” she said as the door swung wide.

The room beyond was unlit, perhaps fifteen feet square, with only the single entrance. All four walls were lined with wine racks, most of them full; some of the bottles were clean and new, others gray with dust and cobwebs, and others at every stage between. Wooden cases holding more bottles were stacked chest-high in the center of the room, leaving only a narrow walkway around the sides.

“No one in here,” the innkeeper remarked.

Arlian, still acting out his role, insisted on stepping inside and tapping on the walls and floor and several of the boxes; the innkeeper waited impatiently while he played out the charade.

They emerged from the wine vault; Arlian waited while the innkeeper carefully locked it. Then they turned aside, stepping between the wine barrels and into a maze of side passages, past vegetable bins and root cellars. Servers continued to fetch wine and beer, providing a constant background of moving shadows and the sound of footsteps and splashing beverages.

As the search continued Arlian began to wonder whether that little girl had decided to settle for just the three coins after all. He tried to steer toward the northeast corner, but felt compelled by his role to poke at the produce and tap walls at every opportunity.

Then a boy came stumbling down the stairs calling, “Madam Innkeeper!”

Arlian waited politely, a few steps away, as the boy told her that Lord Inthior wanted to see her outside right now.

The innkeeper glanced at Arlian unhappily.

“I’ll just look around a little more,” he said. “I won’t disturb anything. And I’ll wait for your return.”

“Very well,” the innkeeper agreed. She followed the boy up the stairs.

There was a temporary break in the stream of barmaids; no one wanted to be in the innkeeper’s way as she climbed the stairs. Arlian took advantage of this and snatched the hammer and crowbar from the hooks; he tucked them under his shirt and held them with one hand while he lifted a lamp with the other and made his way quickly back through the line of wine barrels, and through the labyrinth of pillars, bins, barrels, and boxes to the northeast.

At last he reached a dead end, with solid stone walls ahead of him to both the north and the east.

This corner was among the darkest and dustiest he had yet discovered. Three kegs stood along the north wall, one stacked atop the others.

The top keg was open, and held nails; Arlian lifted it off and set it aside.

The others were sealed. One was unmarked; the other had faint lettering, drawn with charcoal. It was too dusty to read, but Arlian thought it could say “sour wine.” He tipped it, listening closely.

Nothing sloshed, and the weight did not shift like liquid. He turned it over and attacked it with hammer and crowbar. His mining experience came in handy; he was able to knock in the end quickly.

He thrust in a hand, squeezing it between the broken lid and the side, and grabbed. Then he pulled it out into the lamplight.

Gold coins glittered in his palm.

He smiled, pulled the stockings from the waistband of his breeches, and began stuffing them.

When the stockings were full he tucked a few more coins into his tiny purse, then returned the keg to its place, the open end on the bottom where it wouldn’t be noticed as readily.

The keg was still mostly full; he wished he had some way to get the rest out, but could not think of any way to smuggle it past the innkeeper and her staff.

All the same, once he had secured the full stockings he had several pounds of gold hidden under his shirt, and that would have to do. He hurried to replace the keg of nails, then to put the hammer and crowbar back where they belonged.

He was waiting at the foot of the stairs when the innkeeper returned.

“I took the liberty of investigating further while I waited,” he said. “I’d say my uncle’s fears are groundless, Madam. I congratulate you on the efficiency and good order of your cellars.”

She stared doubtfully at him, then looked at the door to the wine vault—still securely closed, of course.

“Would you by any chance have a bed available, or has this throng taken all of them?” Arlian asked.

She laughed harshly. “Oh, all of them and more, my lord,” she said. “I could rent you a space on the floor, if you have bedding.”

“I think not,” Arlian said. “Thank you all the same.” He mounted the steps, trying desperately to move just as he had when there was nothing beneath his shirt but himself. The coins were packed too tightly to jingle, but they might shift…

But they didn’t, and a few moments later he was back out on the plaza with his bundle under his arm; a few seconds in a relatively quiet corner had let him transfer the heavily loaded stockings to the bundle.

He had money at last, real money, but all was not yet perfect. The sun was setting behind the rooftops to the west, and he still needed to find somewhere to sleep.

17

Black

“Accounts settled, then, my lord?” the guard had asked him as Arlian had roamed aimlessly about the plaza, trying to think what he should do.

“Why, yes,” Arlian had said. “Quite successfully.”

“The caravan master’s yet to find another man who knows one end of a sword from the other,” Black said. “I think I may be able to help you with those purchases after all.”

“Excellent!” Arlian had said. “Now, if only you could help me find a bed!”

“Can you pay?”

And it had been as simple as that.

He was awakened not by Black, nor by preparations for the caravan’s departure, but by a rude shaking. He opened his eyes to find the little girl standing on the wagon’s step, looking down at him. The sky behind her was just turning pale in preparation for sunrise.

“She says you owe her money,” Black said from the wagon’s door.

“Indeed I do,” Arlian agreed, as he blinked sleep from his eyes. “Three-tenths of a ducat, I believe.”

She nodded silently.

Arlian sat up and found his purse, and extracted the promised coppers. He was pleased to see gold coins glittering in the morning light, reminding him of the previous night’s adventure.

On an impulse, he pulled out the smallest gold coin he could find and gave that to the girl as well.

“Thank you,” he said. “Your timing was impeccable.”

“And they didn’t even ask me anything when they couldn’t find Lord Inthior,” she said cheerfully. “They believed the whole thing.”

“That’s just as well,” Arlian said. “It keeps matters simple.” He patted her shoulder, and watched as she climbed carefully out of the wagon and ran off.

He wondered whether the innkeeper had really believed the story; it might be unwise to let her see him again this morning.

“I take it your business went well last night,” Black remarked, watching her go.

“Reasonably well,” Arlian agreed.

“If you’ll pardon me, I’ll go see whether our friend the caravan master was equally fortunate.”

“Of course,” Arlian said. He squeezed to the side so that Black could descend the step to the ground.

Black locked the wagon’s door, then stepped past his guest and headed away. Arlian watched him go, curious as to just where the caravan master was. Black, however, almost immediately disappeared around the corner of another wagon.

Arlian hesitated, unsure what he should do. He looked out across the plaza.

Men and women were rising, going about the business of making their wagons ready; on all sides oxen were being led into position and hitched in place, awnings furled, cargo strapped down. Arlian watched the bustle for a moment, wondering whether he should perhaps ride out with these people even if Black did not—though he had nothing to trade but gold, no skills to offer…

On the other hand, perhaps, whatever Black did, he should just go on into Manfort, in pursuit of Lord Dragon, and the twelve surviving women, and those looters who had accompanied Lord Dragon in picking Obsidian’s bones, and the five other lords who had so casually participated in the destruction of the House of Carnal Society and the murder of one-fourth of its inmates.

And information about the dragons themselves. Manfort would unquestionably be the best place to start any attempt to track down and destroy the three dragons that had slaughtered his family.

Sweet was probably somewhere in Manfort. Rose was dead, but Sweet and Dove had been carried off alive. But finding them, in that great metropolis, and freeing them from Lord Dragon, would take time and skill and whatever other resources he could muster. Perhaps, rather than heading directly into the city, he should stay here and see if he could find a way to get the rest of that gold.

But Black had offered to help him buy a sword and learn to use it, and he shouldn’t be hasty in passing that up…

“Stay, then, blast you!” someone bellowed, disturbing the peaceful scene; Arlian saw a dozen people start, and a cat jumped from somewhere and dashed for cover at the sound. “We’ve nine brave men and true, and that’s more than enough!”

Arlian smiled wryly; it appeared Black would not be traveling with the caravan after all. He got to his feet and brushed himself off.

A moment later Black reappeared, frowning slightly. Another man walked beside him—a big, black-haired, bushy-bearded fellow in brown leather, with a sword on his hip.

“My lord,” Black said as he approached, “I must ask you to remove yourself from that wagon.”

Startled, Arlian gathered up his bundle and climbed down. “Is there a problem?” he asked.

“It would seem that I will not be going to Lorigol with these gentlemen,” Black said. “And this wagon is the caravan’s property, rather than my own, so I am required to turn it over to Bonecrusher, here, forthwith.”

“Ah, I see,” Arlian said, stepping out of the way.

“Do you, indeed?” Black said as he mounted the step. “And they say today’s young men have no understanding of the deeper issues.” He vanished into the wagon’s interior.

Bonecrusher waited on the ground, standing a foot or two from Arlian’s side; Arlian looked him over and decided against any attempt at conversation.

Half an hour later the ox-drawn wagons of the caravan were moving slowly out the eastern side of the plaza, one behind another, while Arlian and Black, also headed eastward, walked easily past them. Black’s belongings, intended to keep him adequately supplied for the trip to Lorigol, were in an immense pack he carried on his back.

As they walked Black cast a glance backward at the wagon he would have driven had he stayed with the caravan; it had not yet begun to roll. Bonecrusher stood at the driver’s seat, exhorting the other guards to get themselves and their possessions aboard quickly.

“I wish them well,” Black remarked, “but I can’t say I’m impressed. That wagon should be at the front of the column. If I were driving it would be at the front, and any guards who weren’t aboard it, or astride horses, would ride with the master.”

Arlian asked, “What does it matter, so close to Manfort? Surely there are no bandits here!”

“It’s a matter of discipline, lad! You must keep order, or the caravan isn’t a caravan so much as a lot of wagons that just happen to be traveling the same direction.”

Arlian blinked; he had more or less thought of a caravan heretofore as “a lot of wagons that just happen to be traveling the same direction.”

No, he corrected himself, he had thought of it as a lot of wagons traveling together, and he now saw that that really wasn’t the same thing. Black’s distinction was important. He remembered times in the mines when teamwork had been important, when the miners had had to work together, not just in the same place.

“I see,” he said. “You want everyone to know his place, and stay in it, so that everyone will know where to be and what to expect if they do find trouble later.”

Black glanced at him. “You’re quick,” he said.

Arlian shrugged.

“Or maybe I’m just accustomed to fools,” Black said, with a shrug of his own.

Arlian smiled a little to himself. They were passing the lead wagon now, and he asked, “So the guard wagon should be here? Not the master?”

“The master’s place is at the back,” Black explained. “That way no one can fall behind without his knowledge. The guard wagon goes here to be the first to meet any trouble that might be encountered on the road. There should be at least four men in it, and at least two more in the master’s wagon, and horsemen riding up and down on either side of the column, ready to investigate anything out of the ordinary; the master of this particular caravan has decided to dispense with the riders. Which means he’s dispensed with me—I’ve no horse, but that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate their value.”

Arlian nodded.

“I understand your horse ran off?” Startled, Arlian glanced at Black. How had he heard that?

That was a stupid question, Arlian realized; gossip had a way of spreading, and while the story of Lord Lanair’s arrival at the Weary Traveler was hardly a very exciting tidbit, it was something that Black could easily have picked up.

He hesitated, then admitted, “Actually, I had no horse to begin with.”

“Ah,” Black said. “And were you perhaps resident in Westguard for several days, then?”

“Perhaps,” Arlian admitted. He eyed his companion warily, wondering if he would need to flee.

“You’ll have heard, my lord, that an intruder was discovered at the House of Carnal Society?”

“Why, yes,” Arlian said.

“It’s a curious thing, that no one has found any trace of him since his escape, in his brown homespun and bloody beard.”

“Well, he’d certainly have washed the blood out by now,” Arlian said.

“Indeed. And he might well have trimmed the beard, as well. And changed into a good white blouse and black breeches, and grown a few inches.”

Arlian studied Black, but saw no sign that the man intended any hostile action. “You think so?” he asked.

“Why, I’d venture that at this very minute, he’s on his way to Manfort to buy a sword,” Black said. “But I admit to wondering why he wants a sword, and why he would head for Manfort, rather than some more isolated area.”

“Well, perhaps he intended to elude pursuit by joining a caravan to some distant land, and needs a sword for that. Or perhaps he wants a sword the better to disguise himself as a lord. And where better to find a good sword, and news of a caravan, than in Manfort?”

“You don’t think it more likely he’d have headed off in some other direction, where he might buy a sword in some outlying town and join a caravan as it passes through?”

Arlian replied, “I can think of two—no, of three reasons he might have preferred to turn toward Manfort instead.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “First, it would scarcely be expected, would it? And to do the unexpected is surely wise when one wishes to avoid pursuit and capture. Besides, where is it harder to find a dropped straw—on the road, or in a haystack? Tracking a man through a crowd must surely be more difficult than tracking him through a forest.”

Black nodded.

“Second, perhaps this person has some business to attend to in Manfort, some matter of which we can scarcely be expected to know.”

“It’s possible,” Black agreed.

“And finally,” Arlian said, “If this person has never before visited Manfort, what could be more natural in a young man of normal curiosity than to wish to see the great city?”

“I see,” Black said. “Then you think our fleeing felon intends to buy his sword, attend to his business, see the city, and then join a caravan and depart for places unknown? Is this not a risky course of action?”

“Perhaps this person has been a trifle overconfident,” Arlian agreed thoughtfully. “After all, if we can so readily imagine his plans, those who are seeking him might do as well.” He turned and looked back at the caravan; they were almost at the fork where the caravan would turn to make its way around the city, while they would proceed on to the gate.

“Do you suppose this young man might have acquaintances who would hide him in the city?” Arlian asked. “Perhaps someone he met only recently.”

“And what would induce any sensible person to take such a risk?”

“Why, gold, of course.”

“Of course,” Black agreed. He smiled.

Together the two men passed the fork and started up the slope toward the city gates.

18

Lord Ornisir’s Sword

“It should balance about here,” Black said, resting the sword across two fingers. “It should be light enough that you can use it without tiring, strong enough to pierce your foe without bending or breaking.” He tossed the weapon in the air and caught it in one hand. “The hilt should fit your hand comfortably,” he said. “Remember that a good sword is a tool, something to be used—it’s not just for show. Lordlings such as yourself sometimes forget that.” He took the blade in his left hand and passed the sword to Arlian, hilt first.

Arlian accepted it, closing his hand around the grip. He hefted the sword, feeling its weight, then slashed tentatively at the air.

“You realize, of course, that all the blades you see here have been rejected,” Black said, waving a hand to take in the entire interior of the swordsmith’s shop. “These are noblemen’s blades, not the cruder tools customary for an ordinary guardsman like myself. Every fine sword is made to a customer’s specifications—but the customer may not be pleased with the results, in which case the swordsmith tries again, and the rejected weapon is sent here, to be sold to the likes of us, who know better than to buy the cheap cutlery some people would palm off on buyers, but who lack either the time or the money to commission our own.”

Arlian looked at Black, startled, but before he could reply the swordsmith spoke up.

“And sometimes,” he said, “the swords are sent here because the buyers who ordered them never came to collect their purchases—sometimes out of negligence or inconsideration, but sometimes because the buyer suffered a severe reversal of fortune, perhaps died, before the sword was ready.” He pointed at the weapon Arlian held. “That blade was made for the late Lord Ornisir.”

“Ah,” Arlian said, looking at the sword.

It had a hilt bound in black leather and silver wire, a bell guard of steel inlaid with petals of mother-of-pearl, a long, slim, straight blade, and a pommel of lead caged in silver. It was indeed clearly a weapon meant for a nobleman.

Arlian glanced at the sword on Black’s belt. That, too, was a nobleman’s sword, though older and worn—but Black was clearly no lord; he was employee, not employer.

“And who are we to deny that it was made for Ornisir?” Black said sardonically. “Of course, some would consider it ill fortune to purchase a sword intended for a man who was slain in his bed by assassins.”

“And they’d be fools,” the swordsmith said with a shrug. “Lord Ornisir never set his hand on it, and it’s a fine weapon.”

“I like it,” Arlian said.

“There are a dozen others to inspect before making any decisions,” Black pointed out.

“Of course,” Arlian agreed.

All the same, an hour later it was that same sword in his hand when they left the shop.

“Do you think it was really intended for this Lord Ornisir?” he asked, as he slid it awkwardly into the new leather loop on his belt. He almost tripped over it before he got the hang of walking with the blade at his side.

Black shrugged. “It might have been; it seems a good blade. Even if it was made for someone else and rejected, that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with it—it might not have fit his hand well, or perhaps he thought the chasings didn’t match the color of his eyes. If it suits you, then all’s well enough—though you won’t know its true quality until you’ve fought for your life with it.”

Arlian nodded. “And your own sword? You’ve fought with it?”

“Often,” Black said.

“Did you buy it here?”

Black shook his head. “I took it off a dead man, years ago,” he said. “It’s served me well.” Arlian nodded again.

“But of course, a sword is only as good as the man who wields it,” Black said. “Or the woman, for that matter, as I’ve seen a few women who could use a blade as well as most men.” He pointed at Arlian’s new acquisition. “That’s truly a lord’s sword you just bought, and a good one, but even if it’s the finest blade ever forged I’d rather face you with that sword than a real fighter with a butcher knife any day.”

Arlian grimaced. “I know,” he said. He looked up the street ahead.

They were in Manfort, and the city was still strange and new for Arlian. It smelled of smoke and sewage and baking bread, and when the wind was right or he walked the right streets he could smell the tanneries and dye houses along the eastern wall. Mangy dogs and wary cats foraged in the gutters and alleys, and crows circled overhead or roosted on rooftops, but except for the overcast sky Arlian thought he was nearly as enclosed in stone as ever he was in the mines of Deep Delving. The bustling streets and squares were all paved, either in cobbles or flags, and lined with shops and houses, two or three stories in height, all built of stone and roofed in tile. Since passing the gate he had seen not a single exposed timber nor thatch, nor anything green and growing.

He had remarked on this, and Black had told him, “Stone doesn’t burn. Dragons spit flame. This place was built as our fortress against the dragons. You’ll find plenty of wood and other tinder inside, but not out in the open.” He had nodded up the hill. “In the Upper City the great lords have torn out pavements and buildings to put in gardens here and there, but the common folk down here are happy with the stone.”

Manfort was also vast; the streets wound on as far as Arlian could see in every direction—though that was not far, given the curving streets, high stone walls, and overhanging upper stories. They had stopped at Black’s rented room to deposit their belongings, startling the landlady, who had thought Black was gone with the caravan; Arlian had been thoroughly lost by the time they reached the place. The city was a maze, and while Arlian was sure he could learn his way around quickly enough, he knew he was not yet ready to attempt to find Lord Dragon or his captives.

And he knew he was not yet ready to fight Lord Dragon. He remembered the speed and ease with which Dragon had drawn his sword and cut Madam Ril’s throat; he thought he could manage something not too greatly inferior against an unarmed foe, but he had the imagination to see that matching the attack was not enough. He saw that he must also defend himself against such attacks, and he knew he could not possibly do so effectively.

“Maybe I should have had a sword made new,” he said. Any advantage he could buy, he wanted.

“It wouldn’t make much difference,” Black said. “It’s how you use it that really matters. A new sword would be more expensive and would take at least ten days, probably more—I thought you wanted to find another caravan as soon as possible, and one might form by then. I intend to join the first one I can.”

“Oh,” Arlian said.

“Besides, there’s no reason to think one made for you would be any better, and you don’t yet know enough to be able to say what would work best for you. Not to mention that the chances are good that if you’re serious about learning to use it, that sword will get broken at some point in your training.”

“Oh,” Arlian said again. Even this leftover sword had cost more than he had ever imagined a simple piece of steel could cost—and now Black was saying it might break? He obviously still had a great deal to learn. “Now, most of the lords don’t bother with armor,” Black said, changing the subject. “After all, if you use your sword only to punish unarmed subordinates, or in formal duels, or to defend against assassins who will have done their best to catch you unprepared, armor really isn’t going to be worth the discomfort and expense. However, we lesser mortals, who carry weapons for money, can expect to encounter bandits or other unfriendly folks who are very definitely armed, have no interest in formalities, and who haven’t the patience of real assassins. They may be using clubs or cutlasses, arrows or arbalests—their armament tends to be quite varied and imaginative. A well-padded helmet can save your life when escorting a caravan; a mail shirt or breastplate is heavy, but turning an arrow is worth a little weight.”

“Of course,” Arlian agreed.

“And therefore, let us visit the armorer around the corner here,” Black said, taking Arlian’s elbow and turning him. Caught off guard, he almost collided with an old woman before getting himself headed the right direction.

The swordsmith’s shop had been spare and elegant, the walls draped in cloth, the smith’s forge and workshop hidden away in the back; the armorer’s shop was a startling contrast, crude and cluttered, with weapons and armor stacked everywhere and a rough wooden workbench standing in the very center.

Arlian was amused to see a rack of swords—surely, these were the “cheap cutlery” Black had mentioned. They were shorter and heavier than the weapon he now wore on his belt, with broader blades; some of them curved. He picked one up and hefted it while Black spoke to the armorer. He felt the blade, tried to flex it.

The feel of the metal was different, with little spring to it; this was clearly inferior stuff. He suspected that it would be easy to notch, bend, or break a sword like this.

“My lord!” Black called, and Arlian started. He put the sword back on the rack and turned his attention elsewhere.

Two hours later the two men finally emerged from the shop, Arlian carrying a bundle that contained a mail shirt, a helmet, a set of greaves, and three assorted blades.

Two of the blades were knives—an ordinary belt knife and a dagger. The third was something Arlian had never heard of before, which Black called a “left hand,” or “swordbreaker,” though once he had gotten a good look at it Arlian realized he had seen at least one, long ago.

Lord Dragon had worn one on the right side of his belt on that day almost eight years ago, when he had sat astride his horse looking down at Arlian amid the smoldering ruins of Obsidian.

It was, in fact, constructed much like a sword, with a hilt and guard, but the blade was only about a foot long, and there were two four-inch steel spikes parallel to the blade, one on either side.

“Catch a sword in one of those,” Black had explained, “and you can just twist your wrist and snap the blade right off.”

Arlian had stared at the device in wonder; the maneuver Black described should indeed work.

“Every lord has one now, and those who do any serious fighting know how to use them,” Black had said. “I have one myself, though I don’t parade it about.”

“It just snaps the blade?” Arlian had asked, twisting the swordbreaker to demonstrate. “Just like that?”

Black had laughed at him. “It’s catching it that’s the hard part!”

Difficult to use or not, Black had strongly advised him to buy the thing, and he had.

They returned to Black’s room, a stuffy, dim little place high under the eaves of a bakery.

“A good day’s work,” Black said, as he opened the door at the top of the stair. “At least you’re properly equipped now, even if you haven’t any idea how to use any of it. Tomorrow we’ll start teaching you the basics, and see if there are any caravan notices posted.”

“Thank you,” Arlian said, as they stepped into the room. “You’ve been very kind.”

Black glanced at him as he closed the door. “I have, haven’t I?” he said. “You know, I’m not sure why.”

Arlian started to say something, thought better of it, and coughed on his own saliva as the words caught in his throat.

“I think, my lord, that it’s time you told me more about yourself,” Black said. “Let us start with my suspicion that you have somehow availed yourself of a sorcerous glamour.”

Arlian’s jaw dropped in astonishment. “What?” he said. He had been expecting questions and suspicions, but not that one. He had seen no magic of any kind since he entered the mine, and had almost forgotten such things existed.

“Well, my lord, you must admit that there’s something peculiar about your circumstances,” Black explained. “You seem to have been exceptionally fortunate in deceiving your pursuers—I understand that the town patrols in Westguard questioned Lord Lanair, and never once suspected that he might be the fugitive they sought.”

“I wasn’t what they were expecting,” Arlian protested. “A woman taught me that—people see what they’re expecting to see.” His throat thickened at the mention of Rose, as he remembered how he had last seen her, lifeless and bleeding. He swallowed. “So I made sure I wasn’t what they expected,” he continued. “They were looking for a fleeing vagabond, not a young nobleman demanding lodging.”

“And a good ruse it was, surely…”

“You saw through it quickly enough, though, didn’t you?” Arlian interrupted, suddenly troubled.

“Indeed. If I were easily fooled I’d have been dead years ago. But on the other hand, my lord, consider that you and I are both here, in my lodgings, when by rights I should be twenty miles east of here on the road to Lorigol, leaving you to make your own way in Manfort. Why is that?”

“Do you think I ensorcelled you?” Arlian asked, flabbergasted.

“The thought had crossed my mind—and much later than it should have.”

“I haven’t,” Arlian said. “I know nothing of sorcery.”

“Then we have a mystery.”

“Perhaps I’ve just been lucky,” Arlian said. “Fate is being kind to me at last.”

“Perhaps,” Black conceded. “I tend to think it’s something more than that, though. There’s something in your eyes, and your manner—you have a certain charm about you, and I find myself wondering whether it might be a literal charm, rather than a figurative one.”

“If it is, it’s none of my doing.”

Black nodded, and stared at him thoughtfully. “You know,” he said at last, “I’ve seen it before, I think. In certain of the nobility. There’s an air about them, as if they were born to command those around them. It’s hard to doubt you, or to deny you.”

Arlian snorted. “If you see that, then it’s sheerest artifice, and a recent acquisition.”

“Oh, I see it,” Black said. “No one could doubt your noble birth. It’s a strength, a power—in lords or warriors they call it the heart of the dragon, and men who have it make great leaders.”

“‘The heart of the dragon’?” Arlian’s gorge rose as the words suddenly brought back the memory of lying on the cellar floor, pinned beneath his grandfather’s corpse, with that blood and venom dripping into his mouth. He could almost taste the ghastly brew… Was there a connection?

“I’m not of noble birth,” he said, more to distract himself than anything else. “I was born to a family of freeholders. Tradesmen and artisans.”

“Oh?”

“They’re all dead,” Arlian said. “I was sold into slavery.”

“Yet you look every inch a lord.”

“I was taught to look like one, and act like one,” Arlian said. “By women. And they’re dead now, some of them. Or gone.” He thought of Sweet, carried off in Lord Dragon’s coach, and wondered where she was—was she somewhere in Manfort? Was she nearby, perhaps?

Would he ever see her again? He ought to be out searching for her—but he needed to know how. He couldn’t simply roam about the city at random.

“If that’s all it is, then they did a good job,” Black said. “I suspect there’s more to it than that. And why did these women choose to teach you?”

Arlian shrugged. “A whim.”

“You said you were a slave; how did you get free? You must have had help.”

“I saved an overseer’s life,” Arlian said.

“And he freed you, in gratitude?”

“Yes.”

“In my experience gratitude is an emotion more common in children’s tales than in everyday life.”

Arlian frowned and said nothing.

“It seems to me that whatever else may have happened, there is something about you that prompts others to your aid,” Black said. “You say it’s not sorcerous; very well, I believe you. Nevertheless, call it nobility, or the dragon’s heart, or the urging of Fate, I think it’s real.”

Arlian remembered the taste of his grandfather’s blood. “Perhaps it is,” he said. “It’s not of my choosing, but if it aids me in the pursuit of my destiny I’ll not quibble.”

“You think you have a destiny, do you?” Black asked.

Arlian glanced at him, expecting to see sardonic amusement in his face, but found only a thoughtful expression.

“Yes,” Arlian said. “Or at any rate, I have sworn an oath I mean to fulfill, if it takes all my life.”

“And what would that oath be?”

“To destroy the dragons who destroyed my village, and to bring justice to others who have wronged me and those about me,” Arlian replied.

Black stared at him silently for a moment. “Dragons,” he said at last.

“Yes,” Arlian said defiantly. He knew that his oath sounded stupid, a child’s overblown fantasy—no one had ever killed a dragon. Still, he intended to try.

“Your home was destroyed by dragons?”

“Three of them,” Arlian said. “I saw them.”

“You speak our tongue like a native, and you are too young to be from Starn, in the Sandalwood Hills,” Black said, “so you must mean Obsidian, on the Smoking Mountain.”

“Yes,” Arlian said. He swallowed. It was odd to hear that name again after so long.

“Was your family there?”

“My parents, my brother, my grandfather,” Arlian said.

“And you? Where were you?”

“I was there,” Arlian said. “I hid in a cellar. Looters found me, and sold me to the mines in Deep Delving.”

“So you saw the dragons?”

Arlian nodded. “I looked one in the eye,” he said. “Before I hid.”

“Perhaps that’s it, then,” Black said contemplatively. “You looked Death in the eye and lived; perhaps that’s what it is.” He frowned. “But I’ve faced death at times, and while it changed me, I haven’t the dragon’s heart as you do. Maybe it’s the dragon itself that makes the difference…” He sank into silent thought for a moment. Then he roused himself and said, “And you’re resolved to waste your life hunting dragons? Then why come to Manfort?”

“Many reasons,” Arlian said. “First, where better to go to learn about dragons? This is where men first defied them, isn’t it?”

“True enough,” Black agreed. “The secrets are still kept secret, though.”

“Then I’ll still learn them somehow.”

Black nodded. “And another reason?”

“I need to know more about everything, if I’m to have any chance of success,” Arlian explained.

“And where better than Manfort?”

“Exactly.”

“You seem to be more concerned with learning the sword than with sorcery, though, and surely magic is your best chance against dragons.”

“I’m leaving the dragons until last,” Arlian said. “I’m not a complete fool; I know I probably can’t kill them. I intend to try, but I know I’ll probably be killed myself. So I’m going after the others first.”

“Others?”

“The looters,” Arlian explained. “Lord Dragon and the six he brought with him.” He shuddered at the memory. “They took me from the ruins before I’d had a chance to mourn. They sold me as a slave. They took everything we owned that the dragons hadn’t destroyed—the obsidian, my mother’s jewelry, even the cheeses from our cellars! They’ll pay for that—and payment’s long overdue.”

“By eight years, or thereabouts,” Black agreed. “Now, that’s a goal I can believe in.”

“And Lord Dragon ordered Rose killed,” Arlian said, beginning to lose control of himself. “He had Sweet’s feet cut off. He had the House burned. He cut Madam Ril’s throat. He and Lord Kuruvan and the others…” He gasped for air, and burst out weeping.

He had held it in for so long, but he could do so no more; it was all too much. He had never had a chance to mourn any of them properly—not his mother, or his grandfather, or his father, or his brother, or Hathet, or Rose, or Silk, or the two others dead in the brothel. He didn’t even know which two they were. He didn’t know where Sweet was, whether she was alive or dead, or what had become of all the others. He stood and wept uncontrollably.

Black embraced the youth and let him cry, and the two men stood together for a long time.

No further mention was made of Arlian’s supposed sorcery.

19

The Merchant Lords

Black stopped dead in his tracks as the two walked down the Street of the Wainwrights, and flung his arm across Arlian’s chest.

“What is it?” Arlian asked, startled, as he, too, came to a sudden halt.

Black pointed at the notice tacked to the crazed green paint on a provisioner’s door. “At last!” he said,

Arlian looked, and read.

CARAVAN the parchment read in big blue letters at the top. Just below, in smaller print, it said to the southern borderlands.

And in black, below that, “Seeking Merchants to Join the Expedition, and Men at Arms to Escort Us.” At the bottom were instructions for contacting the caravan masters— three partners’ names were listed, with the address of an office on the Street of the Silk Merchants.

Arlian read this with mixed emotions. Black had been seeking employment with a caravan all along; while he accepted the gold Arlian paid him for lessons in swordsmanship, he had made plain that he considered this a stopgap and had no intention of being a mere tutor.

“There are things you won’t learn on the practice ground, boy,” Black had said one night as they drank ale at the tavern around the corner from Black’s room—Black had undertaken to teach Arlian to tell good ale from bad, along with his other tutelage. “I don’t know who this ‘Lord Dragon’ of yours is, but if he’s as formidable as you make him sound, you’ll need to know more than I can teach you here in Manfort!”

Arlian was not entirely convinced. Lord Dragon was here in Manfort, he was certain; it seemed wrong, somehow, to spend a year or so deliberately going elsewhere— and he now knew that a caravan’s journey out and back, with stops for trade along the way and at the end, could easily last a year or more.

But on the other hand, he knew he still had much to learn before he could face Lord Dragon, even if he found him.

He had not had to make a choice before, as no caravans were in the offing—but now this notice meant he would have to decide, and quickly.

“The Borderlands,” he said, as they stood before the provisioner’s door. “That’s a long way, isn’t it?”

Black glanced at him. “Very long,” he said. “Could be two years, all told, before we’re back here.”

Arlian frowned. He was thinking that Sweet might be alive somewhere in Manfort. He had asked a few questions, made a few brief excursions into the broad avenues of the Upper City, where the city’s nobles made their homes, but had found no trace of her, nor heard any mention of any lord calling himself Dragon—but they might still be here.

“I don’t know,” he said. “That’s a long time.” “You’re young, lad,” Black said, as he turned away from the door. “You’ve plenty of time for your revenge. And you’ll learn more about the world this way, not just about swordsmanship; when you come back you’ll either be ready to take vengeance or you’ll know you’ll never be.”

“You seem very sure of that,” Arlian remarked, turning to follow.

“I am sure of it,” Black replied, setting a brisk pace. “If it were Lorigol, or one of the other ports like Benthin or Sarkan-Mendoth, or if it were into the western mountains, or if it were any number of other routes, then maybe not. But the Borderlands—you visit the Borderlands, boy, and the lands beyond the border, and you’ll come back with a proper respect for dragons, and for the people who took their places.”

“Why?” Arlian asked. “What do dragons have to do with the Borderlands?”

Black turned to stare at him as they walked. “You know why they’re called the Borderlands, don’t you?”

“They’re the farthest extent of the Lands of Man,” Arlian said. “So?”

“So, my boy, think about it! The Lands of Man are the lands we took away from the dragons, yes?”

“Yes.”

“And all the dragons are gone, yes?”

“Well, they’re sleeping in the caverns,” Arlian said. “They aren’t dead. I saw them.”

“Then what lies beyond the Borderlands, my young lord?”

Arlian stared at him blankly.

Black sighed as they turned a corner onto the Street of the Coopers. “Think, boy! You’ve just all but said that what lies beyond is the lands ruled by neither men nor dragons. So what do you think does rule there?”

Arlian’s stare was no longer blank, but shocked. He stopped in his tracks. “I don’t know,” he said. “Gods?”

“Maybe some places,” Black conceded, as he, too, stopped and turned to face his young companion. “Gods here and there, perhaps, and certainly a few magicians elsewhere, but mostly… mostly it’s other things. Things that neither men nor dragons conquered.”

“Oh,” Arlian said.

“And what’s more,” Black continued, “they’re things that couldn’t conquer the dragons. And we’re going there to trade with them—or at least with their subjects. When you see what’s beyond the borders, maybe you’ll see a little more of why I think that’s important, and what it says about the dragons.”

“I know about dragons,” Arlian said.

“You know everything about them?” Black asked. “Can you tell male from female? Do they lay eggs or bear their young alive? How long do they live?”

“I don’t know,” Arlian admitted, taking a step down the sloping street.

“Neither do I,” Black said. “No one does, so far as I know. But you said you know about dragons.”

“I know enough!” Arlian said angrily, turning away and marching on.

“How do you know you do?” Black insisted, pursuing. “Isn’t it good sense to know everything you can about your enemy before you go to fight him?”

“All right!” Arlian said, throwing up his hands in surrender. “All right. I’ll come with you to the Borderlands—and you’ll teach me to fight. Every day.”

“Every day,” Black agreed. He glanced thoughtfully back toward the notice. “And if you have any sense, boy, you’ll take that gold of yours and you’ll buy a wagon of your own, and stock it with trade goods, and you’ll sign onto the caravan as a merchant, not a guard.”

Arlian stopped, thunderstruck.

“I hadn’t thought of that,” he said.

He had been slightly concerned of late at how fast his supply of gold was dwindling; he still had more than enough to fill any purse, but after arming himself and paying Black’s teaching fees he was no longer sure that his stolen fortune would be enough to live on indefinitely.

He hadn’t worried about it, really. After all, he could always go back to the Blood of the Grape and fetch out more of Lord Kuruvan’s gold, and that would be enough to live on for a very long time.

But if he invested it in a caravan—especially if he took all the gold from the broken keg and invested all of it…

Everyone knew that caravans were risky, but highly profitable. He might well return to Manfort really rich, a real lord instead of a fraud, rich enough to hire men to hunt down the looters, buy the twelve women free, and hire an army to hunt the dragons.

Or if disaster struck, he might return to Manfort penniless—or not at all. Still, if he was going to accompany Black in any case, it seemed worth trying.

He would need to get the gold out of the inn’s cellars. He would be able to handle the operation far more effectively this time, since he knew just where the keg was and he had the time and money to prepare properly, but he would still need a distraction.

Black had stopped beside him; now Arlian turned to face the older man.

“Tell me,” he said. “Do you know much about wine?”

The next night, while Black spent half an hour choosing exactly the right expensive wine for an imaginary occasion, thereby keeping the innkeeper busy in the vault, Arlian told the rest of the inn’s staff, “I’ll just get my own ale, thanks!” and strolled down the cellar stairs, mug in hand.

No one argued with the impeccably dressed young lord. He wore his hair brushed back in the latest style, his beard neatly trimmed to a point; he wore a beautiful sword on his belt, and had a fine leather pack slung on one shoulder. He simply reeked of wealth and confidence.

And if he took a long time fetching his ale, and the pack looked a little heavier when he emerged, what of it? He tipped each of the staff a gold half-ducat, even the pot-boy, and it wasn’t as if anything in the cellars other than the rare wines in the vault would be worth such a man’s efforts to steal.

On the dusty walk back to Manfort he asked Black, “What should I buy?”

“A wagon and two yoke of oxen, to start with,” Black said.

“I know that,” Arlian said, nettled. “I mean, what do we take to sell?”

Black shrugged. “I’m no merchant,” he said.

“But you’ve been to the Borderlands before, haven’t you?”

“Twice,” Black acknowledged. “The merchants brought wool and silk and other fabrics, and northern wines, and certain herbs, and traded for talismans, gems, dyes, rare woods, drugs and potions, strange foodstuffs, and for still other fabrics. Oh, and exotic pets—there was a fashion for lizards at the time, though it had all but passed by the time we returned.”

Arlian nodded and shifted his pack to a more comfortable position. “And if we were bound for Lorigol?”

Black looked at him, startled. “Why?”

“I’m just curious.”

“Wool and silk and wine, and we’d come back with oil and salt and spices, with dyes and pearls and curiosities made from seashells.”

“And the western mountains?”

“Well, we wouldn’t take wool!” Black said with a snort of laughter. “Theirs is better than ours. We’d take oil and grain and spices, and we’d bring back brass and chalk and dyes and herbs. And other things; I don’t know. Merchants are always trying new goods.”

“And isn’t that where the most money is to be made?”

“Or lost, if you misjudge what people want to buy.”

Arlian nodded, thinking hard about gold and what it could buy. The best goods were obviously things that were small, so that more could be fit into a wagon, and cheap to buy but precious at the other end of the caravan’s route. And best of all would be something that no one else in the caravan had brought, so that you and the other merchants would not undercut each other.

What gold could buy…

“Do they make good swords in the Borderlands?”

Black looked thoughtful. “No, they don’t,” he said. “They hardly work metal at all. That’s one reason we go there, rather than their merchants coming to Manfort— they make their wagon fittings of wood and leather rather than iron, and arm themselves with arrows, spears, and slings, and the wagons just don’t last that well.”

“Then… well, is there some reason no one takes swords and ironmongery to sell?”

“I don’t know,” Black said slowly. “I believe… well, remember, many of the lands beyond the border are ruled by magical creatures of one sort or another. Such beings are said to dislike silver and cold iron; I know that all the coins in the southern lands are of gold or copper, never of silver. Perhaps iron and silver aren’t allowed there.”

“Then wouldn’t that make them all the more precious?”

Black smiled. “Most likely,” he agreed.

Arlian was careful not to say anything more on the subject until the following day, at the office on the Street of the Silk merchants, after Black’s employment as commander of the caravan’s contingent of guards was settled and the contracts signed. Then, when that was irreversible and Black’s position secure, he announced what he proposed to sell.

The three caravan masters, seated in a row behind their polished black table, were shocked. “Selling iron is forbidden in the magical realms,” Lord Drens said.

“Most of them,” Lord Sandal, seated on Drens’s left, corrected. “Not in Arithei or Stiva.”

Arlian, standing before the table, started at the mention of Arithei; this was the first time since Hathet’s death he had heard the name spoken aloud. And it was spoken by someone who had been to the Borderlands, and would know the truth. That meant it did exist.

It didn’t mean any of the rest of Hathet’s story was true, though. He was probably mad, not an ambassador at all, and his amethysts were probably nothing but pretty stones.

“But who can get to Arithei or Stiva?” Drens retorted. “Not I! The roads are closed, and the native guides are gone, and the only routes are across the Dreaming Mountains. I have no desire to live out my life beset by nightmares, to never again have an untroubled night’s sleep!”

“Really, my lord,” Lady Thassa, at the right end of the table, said, addressing Arlian directly again, “I would not advise bringing ironwork. Our wagons and swords are not permitted in certain areas as it is; we bring them over the borders only under severe restrictions.”

“What about silver?” Arlian asked, pushing Arithei out of his mind.

“Banned in Shei, Furza, and Tirikindaro,” Lady Thassa replied. “Out of favor in the neighboring lands and of no use as currency, but not forbidden.”

“Is it more valuable there than here?”

Thassa, Drens, and Sandal exchanged glances.

“I don’t know,” Sandal admitted.

“And what if I were to sell my goods on this side of the border?”

“We can hardly object to that,” Sandal said. “Trade within the Lands of Man is free and open.”

Lord Drens started to protest, and Lady Thassa interrupted him; a moment later the three were in the midst of a full-blown argument.

Their clerk sent Black and Arlian away, with instructions to return the next day.

They did, and learned that the vote was two to one in Arlian’s favor; Lord Drens yielded with poor grace, but he had yielded.

Now he glared across the table at the troublemaker. “Always remember, Lord Ari,” Drens said, using Arlian’s latest alias, “that we reserve the right to expel you from the caravan at any time should we decide that your continued presence endangers the rest of us.”

“Understood, my lord,” Arlian said with a bow.

“And you understand our contracts? That each member shares in the expenses?”

Arlian nodded. The contracts were quite complex, and rather daunting, as they covered any number of possible contingencies, including provisions for what would happen to his goods if he died at various points in the expedition, and how any proceeds would be shared between his heirs (if any) and the other members of the caravan.

Arlian understood this, and since he was going more to continue his education than to make a profit and had no heirs, nor any intention of dying, he was untroubled by the terms.

“They are quite satisfactory,” he said.

The three masters nodded, and the papers were brought out for Arlian’s signature, concluding the negotiations.

When the caravan assembled in the plaza before the Blood of the Grape two days later, Arlian’s new wagon held some three dozen fine swords—the complete stock of four swordsmiths’ shops—and hundreds of good daggers. A large part of his wealth had been transformed from gold to silver, as well.

He had also acquired all the usual requirements for a long journey—clothing, bedding, nonperishable foods, extra harness for his four oxen, a huge quantity of grain, water, wine, lamp oil, hundreds Of feet of rope, and so on. He had even equipped himself with a bow and a dozen arrows—not that he knew how to use them effectively.

In addition, he brought two pairs of practice swords— low-grade steel with no edge and blunt points, but with the weight and balance of a proper sword.

Although he was a merchant and a full member of the caravan, Arlian was also contracted as a guard in training, an unpaid apprentice, and as such he was assigned the second position, directly behind the lead wagon Black shared with seven other guards; that suited him well. He hired one of the other guards, a man called Quickhand, to teach him to tend and drive oxen, and to drive for him until the lessons were learned.

There were three more guards at the rear, in the masters’ large and elegant wagon, and four on horseback who also slept at the rear—fifteen guards in all. That was deemed adequate by all.

The two wagons that were to hold guards—the lead wagon and the masters’ oversized conveyance—both had large shutters on either side that could be swung back, opening the sides to let in air and light, or to allow the occupants to survey their surroundings; the other wagons, intended primarily for keeping goods safe, were far more solidly built. Arlian’s was little more than a large wooden box on wheels with a platform on either end and a bench seat at the front, all painted a rich blue and trimmed with varnished bamboo.

And on a fine bright day in late spring Arlian sat beside his hired driver as the caravan rolled out of the plaza and headed south, toward the Borderlands.

20

The Road South

“This is Benth-in-Tara,” Quickhand said, as the wagon rolled past a stone marker toward the sprawling town ahead. “We’ll be stopping here for a day to trade with the locals.”

Arlian frowned at the name; he knew he remembered it, but couldn’t quite place it. The long fertile valley of Tara Vale was familiar enough, of course…

Then it came back to him; Benth-in-Tara was where Grandsir had been headed when he saw the ruins of Starn, the village in the Sandalwood Hills that the dragons had destroyed.

Arlian turned to the southwest, peering into the distance.

Those hills were surely the Sandalwood Hills, then— though he was seeing them now from the other side, and as a result there was little familiar in their appearance. The shadowy spike on the horizon would be Skygrazer Peak, and the distant smoke rising from a humped peak beyond the hills would be from the Smoking Mountain, where he had been born.

When he was in the mine he had often dreamed of returning there, and now, if he chose, he could—who would stop him?

But why should he? Nothing remained of Obsidian but ruins. Sweet had told him, one long night last winter when he and she had exchanged reminiscences, that the village was never rebuilt; a place that dragons had destroyed was considered cursed, forever unsafe.

The thought of Sweet troubled him; he seemed to see her face in the western sky. He felt guilty that he was here, rather than back in Manfort searching for her.

He could never have found her and rescued her as the ignorant naif he had been before meeting Black, though. He was not yet ready to make his bit of justice in the world, not yet ready to free her and avenge poor Rose. Thinking about Sweet could only distract him from more immediate concerns; he would come back for her in time.

He once more turned his attention to the town they were entering.

So this, he thought, was Benth-in-Tara, where his grandfather had long ago come to trade. And now here he was, following in Grandsir’s footsteps—but nobody here would be interested in swords or daggers.

He had not thought of that when stocking his wagon; of course the caravan made other stops on its way south, and he had brought nothing to sell at any of them.

That might be an expensive oversight. He frowned.

“A day here,” he said. “What’s the next trading stop, then?”

“Jumpwater, I think,” Quickhand said.

“And after that?”

Quickhand thought for a moment, then ticked off the names on his fingers.

“Blasted Oak, Sadar, Cork Tree, Stonebreak,” he said. “Then we get to the Desolation, and from there there’s nothing until we reach the Borderlands, and where we go depends on what road the masters choose.”

“There’s more than one road?”

“There are at least three routes across the Desolation, and they branch further on the other side.”

“And what determines which route we take?”

Quickhand shrugged. “News and rumor in Stonebreak, the weather, any signs or omens we might encounter… whatever the masters hear and see.”

Arlian frowned. It all seemed too vague and poorly planned for his liking.

“It’s in the southern part of the Desolation that Black and I are going to earn our pay,” Quickhand remarked. “That’s bandit country, where the roads come down off the high plateau and wind through the canyons.”

“Not until then?”

Quickhand shrugged again. “Oh, maybe,” he said. “If we weren’t here there would probably be burglars and sneak thieves slipping into the wagons in every town, but who would dare tackle a group this size, even if they were just merchants?” He gestured at the long line of wagons trailing behind them. “Even merchants can put up a fight, after all.”

“But then how do the bandits in the Desolation operate?” Arlian asked. “How can there be enough to attack this large a group, but few enough that a dozen or so guards can handle them?”

“The canyons,” Quickhand explained. “They can block the road, trap the whole caravan, with just a few men, and then starve the caravan into submission. A dozen good fighters can drive them away and keep them away while the others clear the road.” He paused, then added, “Usually. They have other tricks, as well—they’ll try to split the caravan, or disable a few wagons so they can loot them, or take a few prisoners they can ransom.”

“Oh,” Arlian said. Just then he caught sight of a curious structure ahead, at the very heart of Benth-in-Tara—a single vast roof supported on a forest of pillars, its sides and interior open. “What’s that?” he asked.

“The marketplace,” Quickhand explained, as he steered the plodding oxen directly toward it.

The caravan rolled into the marketplace and formed up in three lines beneath the roof—one along either side, and one down the shady center. The guard wagon, which had no goods to display, was in the center—and Arlian’s own wagon was right next to it.

When they had stopped, as the other wagons were still rolling into position, Arlian leaped to the ground and greeted Black, who had already disembarked.

“Nothing to sell here?” Black asked.

Arlian shook his head. “I didn’t think of it,” he said. “Foolish of me.”

“Ah,” Black said. “And here I thought you’d done it deliberately, so I’d have more time to thrash you tomorrow.”

Arlian smiled; sure enough, he realized, if he had nothing to trade on trading day, he could devote the time entirely to his swordsmanship.

Word of the caravan’s arrival was spreading rapidly through the surrounding farms and villages, and the next day brought hundreds of people flooding into town, eager to see what treasures the caravan might be carrying—even though most of them couldn’t afford to buy anything. Arlian and Black left the crowds behind and found an open field just outside town, left fallow this year and now green with weeds and sprinkled with wildflowers. There Arlian took up a dull-edged practice sword and a wooden swordbreaker, and faced off against Black, blinking in the bright summer sun.

The day after, as the last straggling customers headed homeward and the caravan began rolling again, Arlian was no longer smiling; Black had indeed thrashed him, figuratively and almost literally. They had fought only with blunted practice blades, but Arlian still had a dozen cuts on his chest and arms, all of which had been treated with brandy and bandaged. He also had a scratch across one cheek deemed too small for bandaging, as well as innumerable bruises received not only from the practice weapons, but when dodging had slammed him against a tree or rock, or when he had dodged or parried a stroke of Black’s blade only to receive a punch or kick, or when he had fallen to get out of the path of Black’s blade.

He had thought he was making progress in his lessons, but the day spent in Benth-in-Tara had shown him how far he still had to go. For the first time Black had moved beyond the basics and a few simple practice moves into real fencing, and he had demonstrated that he was able to cut Arlian at will, while turning aside every assault Arlian attempted.

Arlian overcame his initial resentment at this brutal treatment by reminding himself that Lord Dragon might well be as good a swordsman as Black, or better, and Lord Dragon would not hold back, would not stop his blows as soon as they cut cloth or drew blood. He knew that Black, in his brutality, was really doing him a kindness.

But as he sat on the seat beside Quickhand, the cuts stinging and bandages tugging with every bounce the wagon took, it didn’t feel like a kindness.

The evening lessons on the road returned to the less-strenuous mode of demonstration and practice, rather than actual combat, but at Jumpwater, six days later, another trading day meant another all-out training session.

Jumpwater had no covered market like Benth-in-Tara’s, but a series of three broad terraces on the road that wound down the slope toward the Forest River. The wagons lined up on those terraces above the town, and merchants were able to display their goods to the entire population of Jumpwater simultaneously.

Arlian still had no goods to display. The road out of Jumpwater now led across a sturdy wooden bridge, but Black took Arlian down to the rapids, and they fought on the stones that had once been the only way across the river and which had given the town its name.

Arlian’s only consolations were that he received significantly fewer cuts and bruises, and two of the three times he fell in the water he was able to pull himself out before Black could come to his aid.

Ten days after that, at Blasted Oak, while the merchants did their business in the great central square around the shrine that supposedly sheltered the stump of the blasted oak itself, Arlian met Black in a field behind the brewery. There he actually managed to counter one of Black’s lunges and draw blood from the back of the older man’s hand—whereupon Black announced that Arlian was getting too familiar with his opponent’s style, and set the other guards to taking turns in sparring with Lord Ari when they weren’t occupied in keeping order at the caravan market.

None of the others attacked as fiercely as Black, but Arlian discovered that Black had been right—several of the others were able to get past his guard by making moves that Black had never tried.

As he lay on the thin mattress in his wagon that night, wishing he had paid the money for a featherbed at the local inn so that his bruises wouldn’t hurt quite so much, he began to wonder whether he would ever be a real swordsman. There was so much to learn! How could anyone ever learn to counter every possible move, in every possible style? Black insisted that wasn’t necessary, that there were patterns he could learn, but Arlian did not yet see them.

At Sadar he began to see them.

Sadar had no true marketplace, and they were out of the forest once more and onto an open plain; the caravan simply lined up along the road south of town. Black led Arlian out onto the empty plain to practice amid the tall grass.

Summer was just past its peak, and the weather had grown steadily warmer as they moved further south, so the fighting there was done bare-chested and dripping with sweat. Arlian found that this made defense easier; he could see his opponent’s muscles start to tense before the sword itself moved.

Perhaps that was the extra bit of information he needed, or perhaps something simply fell into place, but he found himself moving his own sword to parry his opponent’s before he was consciously aware that Black had attacked. It simply felt right.

Up until now exchanges had mostly been quick— typically feint, parry, thrust, parry, and then a touch or a break. Now, though, Arlian found himself launching into sustained bouts, where his blade and Black’s would dart and clash for minute after minute before one of them left an opening or stepped back to regroup.

Arlian received only a single cut after that, and few bruises.

A fortnight later, at Cork Tree, while the merchants did what business they could in pouring rain, Arlian and the other guards fought in dripping shirts in the yard behind a slaughterhouse. At midafternoon, Arlian left a red welt on the side of Black’s neck.

Black smiled at him. “If you’d been using a real sword I’d be dead or dying,” he said. He touched Arlian’s forehead with the tip of his own mock weapon and flipped a lock of wet hair aside. “See why I keep mine short?”

“I’ll cut it later,” Arlian said with an exhausted grin.

At Stonebreak the caravan set up along the base of the cliff, and the masters demanded that the guards stay close by, and maintain a careful watch—while this wasn’t yet bandit territory, the locals were not entirely trustworthy.

Arlian and Black were therefore only able to manage an hour or two of practice, no more than on most evenings when the caravan was traveling.

Black and Quickhand were now working together, so that Arlian could practice fighting multiple opponents; after all, bandits didn’t usually stage formal duels.

From Stonebreak the caravan made its way up the ravine, into the Desolation. Rumors passed up and down the chain of wagons as to which route the masters would choose when they emerged onto the plateau.

Everyone agreed that the direct route, the straight line across the high desert, would not be safe—the summer had been fairly dry, and the Midway Waterhole would almost certainly be empty, which would mean dead oxen and disaster.

That left the Low Road, around the western rim of the plateau, safe but slow, and the Eastern Road, much shorter and reasonably well watered but through rough country.

Arlian hoped for the Eastern Road; he was impatient to get back to Manfort. He knew that he was now at least an adequate swordsman—still no expert, but adequate—and wanted to get on with his plans for rescue and revenge.

The trail up the ravine was hardly a road at all, Arlian noticed; there were no wheel ruts to be seen, nor any sort of marker. It was simply the route where there were no rocks in the path big enough to stop a wagon. He commented on this—he had to speak loudly to be heard over the wind that howled overhead, above the ravine.

Quickhand shrugged. “Well, there’s nothing up here but the Desolation,” he called back, “and nobody goes through the Desolation except the one or two caravans a year bound for the Borderlands. That’s not enough to make a real road.”

“And the roads across the Desolation…”

“They’re like this. The Low Road has a few markings so people won’t lose the path; the Desert Road doesn’t. I’ve never been on the eastern route.”

Arlian nodded. They rode on, until they finally emerged from the top of the ravine and Arlian saw the Desolation.

He stared out at it in dismay.

For as far as he could see there was nothing ahead of them but brown stone and golden sand; the thin stream that had cut the ravine was hidden in its stony bed, showing only as a black line across bare stone. Not a single blade of grass, not a single speck of green, could be seen anywhere. Hot wind swept across it, stirring the sand.

Arlian leaned to the side and looked back, past his own wagon, past the caravan. The ravine’s curves hid the route they had followed to reach this height, but he could see across the stony plateau to the cliffs.

Beyond those cliffs the world below was still green; he could see green faintly through the summer haze. That was a comforting reminder.

He turned forward again.

Black had stopped the guard wagon by the crack in the stone, and was climbing down. Quickhand directed Arlian’s own wagon to stop beside him.

“We’ll want to top off every water barrel,” Black called. “And while we’re doing that the masters can settle our route.” He turned and squinted at the wasteland. “Doesn’t seem too bad,” he said. “I’ve seen it worse.”

Arlian swallowed; his throat was suddenly dry. “How could it be worse?” he called.

Black looked up at him. “The wind could be stronger, the sun brighter, the air hotter. If we’d been here earlier, at midsummer, I’m sure it would have been worse.”

“Oh,” Arlian said.

“It’s a tricky matter, timing a southbound caravan,” Black remarked. “Too soon, and the summer heat will kill you. Too late, and the streams will have dried up and you’ll die of thirst. I think we’ve hit it about right.”

Arlian looked out at the aptly named Desolation.

“Oh,” he said again.

If this was right, he hoped never to see wrong.

21

The Eastern Road

They took the Eastern Road.

Arlian thought calling it a “road” was sorely misleading; “taking the Eastern Road” just meant circling around the utterly barren sands at the heart of the Desolation on the eastern side until they reached one of the defiles leading down from the plateau.

This route would bring them to the eastern Borderlands; a few of the merchants grumbled that they’d have made a better profit to the west, but most were pleased. Arlian didn’t know enough to have an opinion either way.

Navigation on the Eastern Road was simple enough, even though there were no markers; keep the sands always on your right, and stay on bare stone. Boulders, rockslides, and breaks in the stone too wide for a wagon wheel to cross—and all three were numerous—meant detours. In several places the “road” led across immense, tilted slabs of rock; some of the upward-sloping examples of these were steep enough that the oxen couldn’t manage them unaided, and the riders had to get out and push. A few were so extreme that oxen had to be shared and the wagons hauled up the slope in shifts. On downward slopes the wheelbrakes were used to keep the wagons from running away and running into their own oxen, and riders would walk alongside, ready to grab if the brakes started to slip. When anyone spotted a hole in the stone the entire caravan would come to a halt while buckets dredged up the trapped water.

Arlian wondered how these holes had formed, but no one had an answer. They were simply part of the Desolation; each spring the rains filled them, and until they dried out they made it possible for caravans to get across without dying of thirst, and without hauling insanely huge quantities of water up the ravine from Stonebreak. The limited water supply was the reason only a single caravan each year could rely on safely crossing the Desolation by each of the three routes.

The caravan traveled as far and as fast each day as the oxen and the terrain would allow; there was no reason to linger in this ghastly wasteland. By day the sun and hot wind baked them dry; by night the wind was cooler, almost pleasant, and most of the caravan’s personnel slept out on the rocks, under the stars, rather than in their stifling, overheated wagons.

It never rained in the Desolation in the summer. The more experienced travelers laughed at the very idea. Rain fell heavily enough in the cold months, sometimes flooding dangerously across the stone and turning the sand into treacherous muck, but in the summer the Desolation was always utterly dry.

The sun beat down relentlessly from the cloudless sky, and despite the heat Arlian began wearing a broad-brimmed coachman’s hat to shade his face from that withering glare. He had bought the hat back in Manfort, at Black’s urging, but had never expected to use the thing; now he found it indispensable. As usual, Black had been right.

As the days passed the terrain grew even worse, and more detours were required; they passed broken stones that Arlian thought might be ruins of some sort—but who would ever have built anything here, in the Desolation?

He also found odd marks in the stone on occasion. At one point he noticed a set of three parallel grooves, almost like claw marks—though they were too large for claw marks, and what could claw solid stone?

Other than dragons, of course.

Some of the waterholes were not mere holes, but caves, reaching deep into the stone beneath their feet. One day, as they were pulling water up from one of these, Arlian remarked, “I wonder if any of these connect to the caverns where the dragons sleep?”

Black threw him a sharp glance. “I doubt it,” he said.

Another guard, a smaller man who went by the name Stabber, pointed to the east. “The big caves are over there,” he said. “I saw some of them once when I was with a caravan that got off course in a sandstorm.”

Arlian looked where Stabber pointed, then noticed Black staring at him.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not going to go dragon hunting yet.” He returned his attention to hauling water.

After that, however, every so often he found himself gazing eastward.

Some of the oxen, which had plodded on all this way without protest, began to weaken as the journey across the waste stretched on; a few became too feeble to continue pulling, and were unhitched and allowed to walk behind the wagons on ropes. Most of these recovered their strength; a few did not, and were butchered, cooked, and eaten, thereby extending the human food supply while conserving the grain the oxen ate—and incidentally providing the only meat most of the people aboard the caravan had had since leaving Stonebreak.

Arlian’s own team of four was reduced to three; he rotated them, two pulling and one ambling alongside, thereafter.

A guard’s horse stumbled on the stone and broke a leg, and that, too, provided a brief addition to the supply of meat while conserving grain. The guard was transferred to the masters’ wagon, leaving only three horsemen to ride alongside.

One of the older merchants died in his sleep, and was buried beneath a cairn of stones before the caravan rolled on. As required by contract his goods were divided among the survivors, with the masters taking the largest share and the wagon itself. His heirs back in Manfort would receive a refund of his initial investment, plus the proceeds from the sales he had made so far at the various stops along the way, plus a percentage of whatever profit the masters eventually wound up with.

Arlian had lost count of the days when at last he saw Black pointing at something ahead. He shielded his eyes with his hand and stared, trying to see what Black was indicating.

The horizon was very slightly nearer than it ought to be, Arlian realized. They were finally within sight of the southern edge of the plateau.

They were almost out of the Desolation, and the water and food had not run out.

They celebrated that night, roasting another of the dead oxen and consuming a case of the dead merchant’s wine. Divided among the forty-two surviving merchants, the three masters, the fifteen guards, and some fifty assorted drivers, servants, and family members, that came to little more than a few sips for each, but it was the spirit that counted, not the quantity, and no one was inclined to waste any more of their trade goods in such a manner.

Besides, they were all tired and ready to sleep, and most of them still had to inspect the wheels and traces to make sure nothing needed repair before the next day’s journey. Any wagon that delayed the caravan to replace a broken wheel would be fined by the masters.

At midmorning the next day Arlian was sitting beside Quickhand at the front of his wagon when one of the horsemen, a fellow called Knobs, rode up alongside.

“Ho, there!” Arlian called. “How goes it?”

“Well enough, my lord,” Knobs called back. “I think I see another hole in the rock ahead.” He pointed.

Arlian leaned out to see where Knobs was looking—just as something dark whipped out of the opening in the stone. Knobs gave a wordless cry of surprise and pain and clapped a hand to his shoulder.

Then Knobs, Arlian, and Quickhand were all staring at the black wooden shaft that protruded between Knobs’s fingers.

“Whoa!” Arlian bellowed, yanking at the reins.

The arrow was as long as a man’s arm, bearing two black feathers and one red, and had struck Knobs just below his left shoulder. The tip now made a visible bulge in the back of his shirt, and red was beginning to stain the white fabric—Knobs had not been wearing any sort of armor in the fierce heat of the Desolation, still miles from where anyone had ever encountered bandits.

“By the dead gods,” Knobs said thickly, as he stared at the wound.

Arlian stared as well, sick with horror, but even so he did not permit himself to be shocked into inaction. “Get down!” he shouted. “You’re a target there!” He stopped his team and set the brake, then snatched off his hat—it could only get in the way—and flung it back into the wagon; then he grabbed for his sword.

Another arrow whickered past, brushing Knobs’s horse on the flank before smacking against the side of the next wagon back and glancing off; the horse shied, and Knobs swayed drunkenly in the saddle.

“Shouldn’t we keep moving?” Quickhand asked, as he groped for his own weapons. “A moving target… and Black didn’t give an order…”

“I gave an order!” Arlian snapped. He’d found his sword; now he drew it, tossed the sheath back into the wagon, and leaped to the ground. Another arrow buzzed past him and thumped into his own wagon, burying its barbed metal head in the wood.

“But you’re not even a guard!” Quickhand protested. Arlian ignored him.

The lead wagon had stopped as well, and Black was also on the ground, sword in hand—and swordbreaker in his left; Arlian had not taken the time to find his, and his left hand was empty.

“Keep apart!” Black shouted. “Come at him from different sides!”

“Where is he?” Arlian bellowed.

Another arrow flew, and this one caught Knobs’s horse in the flank, behind the left foreleg; the animal reared, and Knobs, already dazed with pain, tumbled from its back to the stone.

The desert air was full of shouts and screams now, as the rest of the caravan became aware of the attack; some wagons stopped, but others turned out of line and kept moving in various directions. Some were trying to loop around and turn back, away from the ambush; others seemed to be trying to charge forward.

One of the other horsemen was approaching at a gallop, and Arlian had to dodge aside to avoid being trampled.

A fifth arrow missed the galloping horse’s face by inches, and it veered aside; its master struggled with the reins and spurs, trying to regain control.

Knobs’s mount, wounded, was galloping off across the stony ground, its saddle empty.

Arlian now knew where the archer was, though; he had seen the last arrow emerge, as if from the earth itself. Their attacker was hiding in one of the waterholes, popping up only long enough to aim and loose.

A moment later he and Black knelt over opposite sides of the yard-wide opening, peering down into the darkness, ready to kill the archer if he dared rise to fire again.

He didn’t.

“Get a lantern,” Black ordered.

“Quickhand!” Arlian shouted. “A lantern! Now!”

Quickhand had been helping Knobs to his feet; still supporting the injured man, he turned and bellowed, “Somebody get a light, blast you all!”

A moment later Stabber hurried over, lamp in hand.

Black and Arlian looked at each other.

“He could be waiting for us,” Black said.

“I know,” Arlian replied. “Give me the lamp.”

Stabber obeyed after only the briefest glance at Black. Arlian got down flat on his belly on the hot stone and crept toward the opening, sword in one hand and lamp in the other, until he was close enough to lower the light down into the hollow in the stone.

Nothing happened, and he saw nothing but bare stone. He crept closer, until he could lean down and stick his head down into the cave.

He found no one—but it was obvious that someone had been here. The hole in the stone was roughly spherical, and about fifteen feet in diameter; it smelled unmistakably of human sweat and urine. In the center was a rough wooden platform, perhaps ten feet high, with a ladder up one side—plainly, the now vanished archer had stood atop this to fire at the approaching caravan.

But the platform was by no means the only man-made object in the cave. Looking past it Arlian saw a bedroll lying open on the stony floor to one side of the platform’s base, a blanket bunched at one end; an empty wineskin lay beside it, and an earthenware mug atop the wineskin. Half a dozen candle stubs were perched on irregularities in the cave walls, and the stone above each was streaked with smoke stains, and half a dozen more were set on the framework supporting the platform. Orange rinds and crumbs of bread and cheese were scattered everywhere. Even a chamberpot stood in one corner—all the comforts of home, Arlian thought.

He peered a bit more intently into the gloom, and noticed something he hadn’t seen at first—two of those black arrows were thrust point-down into the chamberpot. He grimaced in disgust; that was a nasty touch!

It was no mystery where the archer had gone; a wide opening gaped in the south wall of the little cave, about six feet high and three feet wide—and Arlian, after seven years in the mines, knew at a glance that that opening was not natural.

“There’s a tunnel,” he called. “He’s gotten away.”

“Can’t you go down after him?” Stabber asked.

Arlian lifted his head back out, and had to squint against the sunlight; he momentarily regretted leaving his hat in the wagon. He glanced at Stabber, then at Black.

“He knows the tunnel and we don’t,” Arlian said. “He can hear us coming, and his eyes will be better adjusted to the darkness. And he may have friends down there—he didn’t cut that tunnel single-handed.”

Black nodded. “It would be suicide,” he agreed.

“We can cover the opening, though,” Arlian said.

“With what?” Stabber asked.

“Anything,” Arlian said. He happened to look between the wagons and glimpse Knobs’s horse just then; it was out on the sand, weaving unsteadily, head bobbing up and down, the arrow still projecting from its flank. “A dead horse, maybe.”

Stabber followed his gaze. “She’s not dead,” he protested.

“Not yet,” Arlian said.

“She’s not going to be! We can fix her up well enough.”

Arlian opened his mouth, intending to describe the contents of the chamberpot in the cave, then saw the expression on Stabber’s face and thought better of it.

“Some junk, then,” Arlian said. “An unused chest, maybe.” He peered back down the hole. “And we’ll want to wreck that platform, while we’re at it:”

In the end, Arlian was lowered down into the cave with a rope about his chest, ready to be snatched back up if anyone emerged from the tunnel. He collected the bedroll, blanket, and wineskin, snapped the two arrows in half, then flung the contents of the chamberpot—he judged it as at least two days’ accumulation—as far down the tunnel as he could.

Then, with the aid of ropes and several willing helpers, he disassembled the platform and framework and hauled the pieces out of the cave. Once out, he and the others rebuilt the platform over the opening, sealing it up.

While he had been doing this, others had captured the wounded mare and had tended to her injuries. Knobs, too, had been carefully ministered to.

For Knobs, the shaft was broken off short and pulled out through the back of his shoulder to minimize the damage the barbed head would cause. For the unfortunate horse no such method was possible; the barbs had to be cut out of the animal’s flank. She screamed and reared wildly as this operation was performed, despite the efforts of a dozen men restraining her.

“It’s all no good,” Arlian told Black quietly when he had emerged from the cave and had seen what had been done. “The arrows were poisoned.”

The two men were walking beside the caravan, seeing that all the wagons were back in line. “You’re sure?”

Arian felt ill as he nodded. “Smell them,” he said. “You’ll probably be able to tell.”

As it happened, the arrow that had glanced off one of the wagons lay on the stone not far from where they were walking; Black stooped and retrieved it. He held it gingerly as he sniffed the head.

“Ah,” he said. “I see. Simple, but probably effective in the long run.”

Arlian nodded again. “Slow, though.”

“Knobs is a strong man,” Black said as he tossed the arrow aside. “He may survive it.”

“I hope so,” Arlian said. He swallowed, sickened by the memory of that shaft through Knobs’s shoulder and the spreading stain on his shirt. They took another few steps, and then he added, “I take it we can expect more of this.”

“Maybe,” Black said. “I don’t know; I’ve never heard of anything like it. Tunnels through the stone?”

“Then it’s not the usual method?”

“Not at all. Usually there’s no trouble at all until the wagons start down the slope at the southern rim; then you’ll have rock slides, deadfalls, anything they can do to slow us down, maybe cripple a wagon so it has to be left behind.” He looked thoughtfully at the nearest wagon, a gaudy red-painted construction trimmed with gilt. “It’s almost as if they want us to turn back.”

“But we can’t,” Arlian protested. “There’s no water— not if we follow the same route. We used it all.”

“I know,” Black said. “And they probably know it, too. So they know we won’t turn back, but they’re trying to discourage us.”

“To convince us to surrender without a fight?”

“Probably,” Black said. “He aimed for a horseman—he was after guards, not merchants.”

“And the poison… that’s to slow us down, too. Burden us with sick companions.”

Black nodded. They were nearing the rear of the caravan. “I think a few words with the masters are in order,” he said.

“I’ll come with you,” Arlian said.

Black put a hand on Arlian’s chest to stop him. “You’re not a guard yet,” he said. “You’re a merchant, and a very junior one.”

“My wagon’s at the front of the caravan,” Arlian said. “I think I have a right to express my concerns to the masters.”

Black looked him in the eye, then shrugged. “Have it your way,” he said, dropping his hand.

22